engleski

Litlle Prince - Psychodrama in Clinical Application of Creative Therapy at the Children Oncology Ward

Creative therapy includes the sinergy of psychotherapeutical and functional (psychosomatic, that is somopsychical effects). "Little Prince", the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exúpery, has been applied as a psychodramatic text where different forms of exsistential tensions lived by a child during the hospitalization are elaborated. The aim of the therapy was to diminish the latent and manifestant child anxiety, as well as by improving the physical and psychical conditions to enable the child to participate in other forms of treatment. The special reference is to discovering and maintaining of child's coping strategy, developing the spontaneity, creative expressing, and the quality of life in general. The method of intervention, evaluating systems of emotional conditions and registration of defined variables for fear and joy are shown here. The results show a great influence of creative therapy on the general condition of a child during hospitalization. This therapy programme has been realized under the cooperation agreement among Hospital for Children's Disease (children's oncology department), Department for Motor Disturbances and Chronic Diseases of Educational and Rehabilitational Faculty, University of Zagreb. The clinical study was performed as a part of the project which examines the influence of supportive therapies on oncology patients, supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of the Republic of Croatia. The cases in this study refer to two children, age 8 and 10, with the final diagnosis of Morbus Hodgkin and Rlabdomyosarcoma vesicae urinariae. There is a latent existential tension present with all the ill children (lack of appetite, sleeping disturbances and very low level of tolerancy on frustration), which they show by permanent biological anxiety.

Psychodrama; childhood cancer; fear; joy

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