Analytic Psychodrama as adjuvant treatment for chronic disease: four experiences with diabetes mellitus type 1 patients

A chronic pathology can compromise in many ways one person’s life quality, conditioning his self-perception and relationships in such a way that they become impoverished and rigid, sometimes severely. Within the theoretical framework of Health Psychology, we decided to try to handle this problem through the Analytic Psychodrama, a potentially useful tool because of its power to enable people to re-elaborate their own visions and interpretations in the fluid, creative and shared context of the scene. Starting from 2005 we have used this method with four different groups, directing our attention mainly to the effectiveness of our action, but also monitoring outcomes by means of psychometrics techniques. The first group was small in number but it had a long time to develop its paths (one session a week for ten weeks). The three other groups were more numerous but their activity was concentrated only in
one intense weekend. Two of them were dedicated to couples in which at least one had diabetes, while the last group was open not only to diabetes patients but also to their relatives and friends.
The psychological activity was always supported by a diabetes specialist contribution, aimed at clarifying important medical topics and their impacts on the patients’ everyday life. We always used an assessment questionnaire, which was built ad hoc and proposed in two complementary forms at the beginning and at the end of the whole activity; given the different nature of the groups, the questionnaire was readjusted from time to time and allowed us to capture the participants’ initial and final attitudes, their judgments and opinions about the experience, their suggestions to improve our service. We believe our results to be rather positive and encouraging and we would like to report them in
detail, though briefly, together with the methods we adopted.
Keywords: Analytic psychodrama, homogeneous groups, chronic disease

Bonafede Carolina
SIPSA (Società Italiana di Psicodramma Analitico) ~ Bologna ~ Italy

Quartararo Marco
Università di Roma Tor Vergata ~ Roma ~ Italy
marco.quartararo@gmail.com