Drama Therapy: A Description of Seven Mental Patients in a Drama Therapy Group at the Day Treatment Center of the Veterans Administration Regional Office, New York City, 1964
Abstract
Background, Timeliness, and Importance of the Study. The schizophrenic has been liberated at last from the concrete womb of the asylum. Modern technical advancements in psychiatry and the accompanying disciplines have enabled us to treat him and subsequently, when remission occurs, to send him home — to liberate him from social and familial anonymity. It is toward this homecoming that more and more of us must turn our thoughts and our efforts. We are searching for newer, more creative, and more effective ways to help the mentally ill person make the transition from the safety of the hospital world to the more complex and often frightening milieu of family and community. In my work with formerly-hospitalized schizophrenics in a student placement at the New York Regional Office of the Veterans Administration, I became acutely aware of the schizophrenic’s reaction to posthospital life: his constant struggle to feel whole and human; his strivings to reach out to others; his terrible fear that no one will respond to his gesture or his plea. I watched him work and play and grow in the Day Treatment Center there, a facility designed to reorient him to family and community living through group interaction with fellow patients. And I became curious about the curative value of communication with other patients and of the various group therapies used in the Center.
Subject Area
Social work|Clinical psychology|Social studies education|Mental health
Recommended Citation
Everston, Margaret, "Drama Therapy: A Description of Seven Mental Patients in a Drama Therapy Group at the Day Treatment Center of the Veterans Administration Regional Office, New York City, 1964" (1964). ETD Collection for Fordham University. AAI30725046.
https://research.library.fordham.edu/dissertations/AAI30725046
