THE PLACE OF PSYCHODRAMA IN AN INPATIENT PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT PROGRAM

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to conceptualize the effect of psychodrama on the social system of a psychiatric ward in terms of principles derived from sociometry, social psychology, sociology and role theory.

The life of a hospitalized mental patient is a complex system of transactions which can be broken down for study into three perspectives: the institution, the small group configuration and the individual patient.1

At the institutional level, two serious ailments of the social system are the institution's extreme boredom and its tendency towards dehumanization of people. Boredom is the affect expressed in certain kinds of impersonal human experience. Social system boredom seems to be the outcome of the systematic negation of self; role behaviors which are mechanical, unrewarding and unreciprocal; lack of participation in the shaping of the immediate system; and isolation of the current social system from other contiguous social systems.