Alzheimer's

[HV Psychodrama]

Dear Peter,
What an inspiring story. Thank you for sharing it with us. 
Rebecca Walters
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Peter Parkinson 
  To: list at grouptalkweb.org 
  Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2007 11:40 PM
  Subject: RE: Alzheimer's


  Alzheimer''s.

  Doing psychodrama with such people is one thing that I have done very little and with no results to report. I have. However I had the opportunity to direct and share in the care of my mother's final 10 years of her life. Her care was all based on psychodramatic principles and my wife and children and her professional carers were trained to be her auxiliaries. We did a role analysis of both her current functioning and the functioning that she dreamed of throughout her life. 

   

  We thus worked appropriately to reduce her overdeveloped roles, expand her creative roles and give her opportunities that she had never had in her life.

   

  Her overdeveloped controller was based on an assumption of being unlovable. So we were able to encompass her matrix of all reality to the point that one of her final statements was "You know dear, when you know that you are loved on this side (of life/death) then it makes it so much easier to move to the other side."

   

  The overdeveloped avoider of reality led her to alcohol, other drugs, tv day and night, and a dominant bullying personality. We became dominant auxiliaries and applied cold turkey to all these, and insisted on her going to social and creative events every day.

   

  She was met with people who could fight just as well as she could.

   

  3 months of this and her dementia had lifted, she, with a minder took holidays with her old friends, played bridge, resumed painting, went gambling and eventually launched her own 33 ft sloop, upon which, with assistance of a skipper/minder, she spent much of her last 10 years of her life with her old crew from her yacht racing days.

   

  Dementia did catch up with her, as did a fractured hip or two, but behaving as auxiliaries towards her and keeping her role repertoire forward in everyone's mind together with the able supervision and mentoring of Isabelle Sherrard, gave my mother a most wonderful final 10 years of her life, and for myself the great honour of being part of it.

   

  The whole tale is massive and soon I will write it up as an article or other publication.

   

  Cheers from

   

  Peter Parkinson 

  Aoteoroa New Zealand

  Practitioner/Educator

  Physician

  PhD etc

   

   


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  From: list-bounces at grouptalkweb.org [mailto:list-bounces at grouptalkweb.org] On Behalf Of HV Psychodrama
  Sent: Saturday, 20 January 2007 12:06 p.m.
  To: grouptalk
  Subject: Alzheimer's

   

      This seems to be the week for discussions about very serious disorders/diseases/states of being. I was asked today about the use of psychodrama with people with early to moderate Alzheimer's. Years ago I worked in a day treatment for elderly de institutionalized people who had lived for years at Hudson River Psych Center. They got great joy out of enacting childhood dreams of what they wanted to be when they grew up. But they didn't specifically have Alzheimer's. So,...has anyone out there had any experience using psychodrama with people with Alzheimer's disease? 

    

   

   

   

  Hudson Valley Psychodrama Institute
  68 DuBois Road  New Paltz, NY 12561
  (845) 255 7502   hvpi at hvc.rr.com
  visit us at our website:  www.hvpi.net



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