Timings: 10am - 4pm
Location: London (Clean Break, Kentish Town)
Price: Members: £90 | Non-members: £120 | Student Members: £60
The day will be a mixture of theory and experiential, with time for discussion and questions. Clare Hubbard and Susie Gomez will begin by looking at the medical and psychotherapeutic understandings of and approaches to psychosis and think about what dramatherapy can offer. They also hope to include the stories of people with lived experience.
NICE recommends arts therapies for the treatment of psychosis for “subsequent acute episodes of psychosis or schizophrenia and referral in crisis” and in relapse, “particularly for the alleviation of negative symptoms”. It is the only NICE guideline for mental health in which arts therapies are specifically recommended.
Susie will share her approach to working in a Psychiatric intensive Care Unit (PICU). She will explain how she has adapted a model of working to provide therapy to clients who present as floridly psychotic, where thinking and reflecting in the sessions may not be possible. We will consider the challenges of working on a PICU ward and what the aims of this work might be.
Clare will then share her approach to community group work for people who have had to find a way to live with ongoing psychotic experiences. There will be opportunity to take part in some exercises we may do in sessions, with time to reflect on them together. We will also touch on making a business case for dramatherapy.
Susie Gomez
Susie Gomez is a Dramatherapist, BPC registered Forensic Psychodynamic Psychotherapist and IGA trained group work practitioner . She has 23 years’ experience of working within secure forensic services, and acute and PICU wards with people who are suffering from psychotic illnesses.