A BLUEPRINT FOR A PSYCHODRAMA PROGRAM

Abstract

Psychodrama first appeared as a therapeutic vehicle at the Fort Logan Mental Health Center in 1963. At that time, the Director of Work Therapy initiated an ad hoc program for patients among the several adult psychiatric treatment teams. Although the psychodrama sessions were voluntarily attended, a significant volume of staff and patients attended regularly. As patients continued to participate in the psychodrama sessions, the staff concurrently began to consider decentralizing the existing centralized psychodrama sessions from total hospital to the level of the treatment team. A major impetus for decentralization was a growing paradox that occasionally some patients disclosed their feelings, pains, and problems quite spontaneously to a heterogeneous group while remaining tacit and aloof from the individuals identified with their treatment unit. That is, patients enacted via psychodrama important areas of their lives in a locus where those staff and patients who might be most helpful were not present.