Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2021
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
MA - Master of Arts
Department
Expressive Therapies
Advisor
Denise Malis
Abstract
The process of hospitalization and the environment of a typical psychiatric hospital is often counter-therapeutic. To challenge this problem, clinicians may introduce the concept of psychological containment. To elaborate, being hospitalized anywhere can be disorienting, frightening and even traumatic. This problem is only further exacerbated in psychiatric hospitals where patients may be disorganized, manic, or struggling with psychosis. Furthermore, psychological containment is essentially the ability for psychiatric patients to prevent their intense emotions from effecting others negatively, and to act with resiliency when other patients are unable to contain their own disruptive behaviors. This paper utilizes both an initial literature review to understand the problem at large, as well as the creation and an application of a therapeutic method on a hundred-bed psychiatric hospital. This method aims to address and explore containment and is further examined through personal artistic inquiry on the part of the writer. This work leads us to a main conclusion: introducing the concept of containment to a psychiatric unit is one step in creating an environment that is less traumatizing, and more therapeutic.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Copans, Max Sandor, "Making Room: Addressing the Counter-Therapeutic Nature of Psychiatric Hospitalization Through Containment- Based Group Expressive Therapy" (2021). Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses. 437.
https://digitalcommons.lesley.edu/expressive_theses/437
Included in
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Rights
The author owns the copyright to this work.
