Group psychodrama for children with leukemia: A brief report.

OBJECTIVE: Group psychodrama for children is one of the methods of group therapy in treatment of many behavioral and emotional disorders of children. However, it has been used very few in hospital settings. So, in this study, the group psychodrama was applied to evaluate its effectiveness for. METHOD: Sixteen children with leukemia aged 6-9 years participated in the present randomized controlled trial. Eight children in the intervention group and eight children in the control group were randomly assigned. The intervention group participated in eight sessions of group psychodrama (during the hospitalization time) and the control group waited for the treatment. The score of the bio-psycho-social expressions of incompatibility in hospital (BPSEIH) checklist was the criterion of evaluation of the group psychodrama effectiveness. RESULTS: The results showed that group psychodrama was significantly effective in modifying the BPSEIH. CONCLUSIONS: The findings indicate the effectiveness of group psychodrama to moderate the psychological consequences of cancer and showed the feasibility of using this method in the hospital settings.

Psycho-art-drama: development and testing a new integrated complementary method of psychiatric treatments for hospitalised children with cancer (a case study).

Objective: Art therapy as a psychotherapy method using art, and psychodrama as a therapeutic method using role play, have different roots, principles, techniques and different effect mechanisms and advantages. Integrated psychotherapies are aimed to maximise each of the component advantages, as well as minimising disadvantages. Therefore, the main objective of this study was to develop a new integrated psychotherapy method, named psycho-art-drama (PAD) for hospitalised children with cancer and testing its effectiveness.Methods: After designing the PAD protocol, five hospitalised children with cancer accompanied with their mothers selected based on inclusion and exclusion criteria to participate in this single-subject study.Results: The results showed that PAD was significantly effective in reducing the bio-psycho-social expressions of incompatibility in the hospital (BPSEIH) in all of the five children.Conclusions: Findings of this study give preliminary support using the PAD model in similar conditions.