Dramatherapy

This article focuses on the practicalities, playful interventions and value of facilitating a family dramatherapy group at a Special Needs primary school. The group, comprised of four children with profound and multiple learning disabilities (PMLD) and their four primary carers, is co-facilitated by the author, a qualified dramatherapist, and a teaching member of staff. As the majority of children travel to and from school on a specially provided bus, there are few opportunities for their parents to meet one another. The dramatherapy group provides the parents with the opportunity to speak about the practical and medical aspects prevalent in their family worlds. It also offers all the participants something different: a ‘secure base’ which encourages individuals to take creative risks, attune, and reflect back feelings present within the group as part of a contained and confidential experience. Their unique relationships are witnessed, valued and developed through the therapeutic mediums of drama and movement. The article explores the theory related to the practice, and evidences, promotes and evaluates the rationale for family work with this client group.

This essay will outline some of the means and implications of attending to living processes in Sesame Dramatherapy. Broadly defined, living processes are those which exceed rigid, reductive, fixed or thing-like concepts. Insofar as our more mobile concepts often collapse into fixed definitions or signs, we might say that living processes resist conceptualisation altogether. I will consider how to avoid objectifying living processes which, as a category, encompass psychic processes and our experiences of other people and living beings. I will investigate how it is possible to enter into an ‘I-Thou’ relationship with the diverse phenomena of Sesame Dramatherapy sessions, stepping out of ‘I-it’, objectifying ways of relating. In order to do this, I will draw upon three main philosophical streams: Goethean observation, phenomenology and Eugene Gendlin’s Philosophy of the Implicit. Some of the therapeutic implications of this will then be outlined, with particular reference to the creation of meaning and the experience of selfhood.

The Internet has become thoroughly embedded into most aspects of modern life, and no one is more plugged-in than the youngest generations. With the aim of utilising the omnipresence of the digital space to therapeutic ends, this article examines the application of online storymaking interventions with adolescents. The young people discussed are quite isolated and high-need; they have self-excluded from mainstream school and are now pursuing education in an alternative online provision, where they also have access to therapy. Following an overview of the current literature on web-based therapies, this article offers two illustrative case studies in which a story-based dramatherapy intervention was delivered online. This will include an evaluation of the therapeutic work from the case studies using the BASIC Ph assessment method, as well as a broader discussion on the experience of working as a therapist online.

This study adds to a small literature on social skills measures and interventions for adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or related social communication difficulties (SCD) without intellectual disability (ID). In study 1, a new multimodal assessment tool, the role-play assessment of social skills (R-PASS), was used to measure real-time application of social skills. The scores of adults with ASD/SCD were marginally lower than those of neurotypical adults, with a large effect size, suggesting that the measure can identify differences between the two groups. Therefore, the R-PASS shows potential as an objective tool to assess dynamic and naturalistic social skills. In Study 2, a pre–post single-group design study, we measured the effectiveness of a drama-based social skills intervention for seven participants who self-identified as having ASD/SCD. The R-PASS was used by external raters blind to diagnosis and intervention status to compare the performance of intervention participants to that of neurotypical adults. R-PASS scores suggested substantial improvement of social skills in the majority of participants post-intervention. Furthermore, relatives’ and participants’ perception of their social communication and self-regulation skills improved from pre- to post-intervention. These results suggest that the intervention may have helped the participants improve their social skills.