Dramatherapy and Recovery offers a comprehensive and groundbreaking approach to harnessing the power of theater in the recovery process through the use of playmaking and performance. This manual is based on the CoActive Therapeutic Theater (CoATT) model, the first of its kind to be meticulously documented and standardized. With its emphasis on replicability and measurable outcomes, the CoATT model is brought to life through annotated scripts and progress notes extracted from past productions involving diverse populations, including those with eating disorders, aphasia, schizophrenia, and substance abuse disorder. The authors illuminate the six principles that distinguish CoATT from other therapeutic and applied theater approaches. The chapters provide a structured framework compromising seven defined movements that act as attainable milestones for participants guided towards producing a powerful and transformative public performance. Dramatherapy and Recovery equips practitioners of dramatherapy, counseling arts in health, applied theater, community theater, and other mental health disciplines with the tools needed to create transformative performances with individuals reconnecting with the community after treatment.

Dramatherapy uses the healing aspects of drama and theatre as part of the therapeutic process and is increasingly required to supply evidence of its effectiveness. This book aims to provide an evidence base for practice with destructive clients, and raise the profile of dramatherapy as a distinct therapeutic intervention in this field. Dramatherapy and Destructiveness discusses working with those suffering from conduct disorders, mood disorders, schizophrenia and personality disorders. Divided into three parts, topics of discussion include: theory and research underpinning the understanding of working with destructiveness in-depth case studies of dramatherapy with a wide range of clients analysis and evaluation of the evidence base for dramatherapy with these clients guidelines for best practice Dramatherapy and Destructiveness covers a wide range of client groups, settings, methods and therapeutic approaches. As well as being an invaluable resource for dramatherapists, this book will be of interest to other therapists, health professionals, social workers, teachers and artists.

This third edition of Current Approaches in Drama Therapy offers a revised and updated comprehensive compilation of the primary drama therapy methods and models that are being utilized and taught in the United States and Canada. Two new approaches have been added, Insight Improvisation by Joel Gluck, and the Miss Kendra Program by David Read Johnson, Nisha Sajnani, Christine Mayor, and Cat Davis, as well as an established but not previously recognized approach in the field, Autobiographical Therapeutic Performance, by Susana Pendzik. The book begins with an updated chapter on the development of the profession of drama therapy in North America, followed by a chapter on the current state of the field written by the editors and Jason Butler. Section II includes the 13 drama therapy approaches, and Section III includes the three related disciplines of Psychodrama and Sociodrama, Playback Theatre, and Theatre of the Oppressed that have been particularly influential to drama therapists. This highly informative and indispensable volume is structured for drama therapy training programs. It will continue to be useful as a basic text of drama therapy for both students and seasoned practitioners, including mental health professionals (such as counselors, clinical social workers, psychologists, creative arts therapists, occupational therapists), theater and drama teachers, school counselors, and organizational development consultants.

This book addresses the needs of children experiencing the hospitalization or death of a caregiver or loved one to comprehend and cope with tragedy with the assistance creative non-fictions and dramatic play. Based on the author’s two-decade-long clinical practice and an extensive career working with bereaved children and their families as a dramatherapist and child life practitioner, this book demonstrates how storytelling and dramatherapy can be used to tell the truth to children in these difficult circumstances. Through vivid and candid case examples, the author demonstrates the developmentally normative, dramatic, and psychotherapeutic principles that inform her work. She shares stories for children that are carefully constructed to help children understand the truth of what they are facing rather than shielding them from reality. Attuned to the children’s direct experience, these stories take care to respect the culture and context of the death, and the histories of the people involved. The book, accessibly written, will provide guidance, insight, and comfort for professionals, clinicians, and grieving children and their families. Additional reader resources can be found at https://nowhitelies.com/store and www.routledge.com/9780367461041 under "Support Material".

This edited volume explores the singularity of embodiment and somatic approaches in the healing of trauma from a dramatherapy, theatre and performance perspective. Collating voices from across the fields of dramatherapy, theatre and performance, this book examines how different interdisciplinary and intercultural approaches offer unique and unexplored perspectives on the body as a medium for the exploration, expression and resolution of chronic, acute and complex trauma as well as collective and intergenerational trauma. The diverse chapters highlight how the intersection between dramatherapy and body-based approaches in theatre and performance offers additional opportunities to explore and understand the creative, expressive and imaginative capacity of the body, and its application to the healing of trauma. The book will be of particular interest to dramatherapists and other creative and expressive arts therapists. It will also appeal to counsellors, psychotherapists, psychologists and theatre scholars.

The first overarching work on dramatherapy intercultural practice and research, this book explores the therapeutic encounter between therapists and participants as an intercultural space, highlighting how attending to cultural differences informs care. Drawing on international voices of practitioners and participants, each chapter seeks to explore how social and political struggles, such as rising global conservatism, nationalism, climate crisis, increasing displacement and the coronavirus pandemic, are experienced in dramatherapy. Main themes covered include the development of intercultural good practice guidelines, therapist transparency – especially through self-disclosure and transference issues for the therapist – and the negotiation of power relationships across identity differences. The book concludes with a section on recommendations for training, supervision and practice. A resource from which new practice and research can emerge, this book will be valuable to dramatherapy educators, practitioners and students, specifically those interested in intercultural practice.

This substantially revised and expanded edition of the The Drama Therapy Decision Tree provides an integrated model for therapeutic decision-making by uniting drama therapy interventions with diagnostic information, individual and group processes, psychological distance, the drama therapy pie, and global outcomes. This book is a practical guide in four sections, not a checklist. Rather than using a standardized protocol that makes the decisions for the therapist, drama therapy is based on dynamic, embodied, creative action with participants in the here and now. Conscious planning on the part of the drama therapist before the session supports spontaneity and creativity, preparing them to make good therapeutic decisions in the moment during the session. The opening section guides readers through the foundational principles leading readers into Section Two, The Decision Tree, which is a series of questions for early career drama therapists to ask themselves as they prepare treatment plans for clients. Diversity, Equity, and Ethics are covered in Section Three from the point of view of creative arts therapy practitioners. Section Four looks at Integrating the Five Phases of Treatment with the Drama Therapy Pie, following different populations (diagnosis) of clients through the five phases of group therapy in order to illustrate how the Decision Tree supports intervention choice in the different phases of treatment. The authors strive to provide a common language for communicating what drama therapists do and how they do it in order to demystify drama therapy for other mental health and medical professionals. Using the decision tree as a guide, early career drama therapists can move forward confidently and ground their work with participants in an integrated system. An online searchable database of drama therapy interventions provides descriptions, therapeutic outcomes addressed, and other useful information provides a wealth of additional supporting material. There is also a separate online resource of deroling activities. The online resources can also be an asset for non-drama therapists who are wanting to incorporate a more active and embodied component safely into their work, particularly in terms of warm-ups, closure, and deroling.

Dramatherapy for Borderline Personality Disorder: Empowering and Nurturing People Through Creativity demonstrates how dramatherapy can empower those individuals struggling to live with borderline personality disorder, and help them embrace and control the emotional inner chaos they experience. Based on current research into the aetiology, symptoms and co-morbid disorders associated with BPD (and emotionally unstable personality disorder), this book demonstrates the effectiveness of dramatherapy for individuals and groups on specialist personality disorder wards and in mixed diagnosis rehabilitation units. It also reveals a creative approach for making dramatherapy work in harmony with approaches such as dialectical behaviour therapy and cognitive behaviour therapy. Aimed at those working with service users, and utilising a range of case studies and clinical vignettes, Dramatherapy for Borderline Personality Disorder provides an insight into the potential of dramatherapy, which will be welcomed by mental health professionals.

In this insightful book, Oldfield and Carr draw together persuasive arguments for combining aspects of music therapy and dramatherapy, whilst retaining their unique facets. Building on the many links between music and drama and the compatibility between the two disciplines, the authors explore how artistic aspects of each therapy can be drawn on to create fresh ways of working. This approach enriches the practice of professionals working to support people with special needs, people recovering from trauma and social deprivation and a wide range of other service users. Despite the significant overlap in music therapy and dramatherapy techniques, this is the first book to directly explore the vast potential of elements of the two disciplines being brought together. Covering a range of different perspectives and practice contexts, this book demonstrates just how much the professions can offer each other both from a clinical perspective and from the point of view of training therapists.

This book examines how drama therapists conceptualize and respond to relational and systemic trauma across systems of care including mental health clinics, schools, and communities burdened by historical and current wounds. This second edition of Trauma-Informed Drama Therapy: Transforming Clinics, Classrooms, and Communities offers a broad range of explorations in engaging with traumatic experience, across settings (clinical, educational, performance) and geographies (North America, Germany, Sri Lanka, South Africa, India, Belgium), and methodologies (Sesame, DvT, ethnography, performance, CANY, Self Rev). Each effort runs into obstacles, resistances, biases, and random events that highlight the authors’ passion and courage. No solutions are to be found. No grand schemes are proposed. Just hard work in the face of impenetrable truth: we are still at the beginning of understanding how to achieve an equitable, moral, accountable, healthy collective being-with. Confronting trauma, listening to victim testimonies, sitting with unsettling uncertainty, understanding the enormity of the problem, are difficult tasks, and over time wear people down. The chapters in this book belie this trend as they illustrate how the passion, creativity, faith, and perseverance of drama therapists the world over, each in their own limited way, can help. In each of these chapters you will read about people who have been pushed to the margins of existence, and then, how drama therapists have worked to remind them of their immutable, unique value that can transcend and transform those margins into spaces of care, power, and possibility. It will be useful for creative arts therapists, mental health professionals, educators, students and many others interested in the role of the drama and performance in the treatment of trauma.