Can Anybody Tell me who I Am?: A Memory of Institutional Dramatherapy

Abstract

When I was Chaplain of a psychiatric hospital, my office was known as The Beauty Therapy room, this having been its use before I arrived to take up residence. In fact it was a spacious sitting room at the heart of the old hospital. People used to come and see me there when they felt they needed someone to talk to and were searching for a member of staff with time to listen. Some of those who came found difficulty in finding words for talking – not ones which made sense to anyone else. This was because the world they were describing was somehow out of step with other people's reality.