BRIEF REPORT: Managed Care and Inpatient Psychodrama- Short Sessions Within Short Stays

Abstract

Psychodramatists need new ways of conceptualizing and providing psychodrama in this era of 7- to 14-day inpatient stays, with programmed group times being only 45 to 60 min once weekly. Our experience at several psychiatric hospitals in Chicago has shown us that we can be surprisingly effective by making the following changes in our technique:
1. We have found we can eliminate the warm-up because the patients interact and are continually working together on their issues. This interaction reduces the need for the director's having to focus the group and build interpersonal trust.
2. We generally do not have to spend much time setting a scene because the protagonists often prefer to remain "grounded" in the safest space they know, the group room itself, and because the scenes that are to be played often are set in a surplus-reality context in which the actual surroundings are irrelevant.
3. There is less need to begin in the present and search for a past scene because, often, patients have been dealing with the past with their other therapists or in a psychotherapy group and can go directly to that scene.