The Play Paradigm Presents: An Encounter Between Mental Health and Drama Therapy presenter: Dovi Blum-Tazdi Drama therapist and clinical criminologist Doctoral student in psychoanalysis & hermeneutics Israel Email: dovblum@place-to-be.co.il 052-5277726

1. THE PLAY PARADIGM PRESENTS:
An Encounter Between Mental Health
and Drama Therapy

2. PRESENTER
Dov Blum
Drama therapist and clinical criminologist
Doctoral student in psychoanalysis & hermeneutics
Israel
Email: dovblum@place-to-be.co.il
052-5277726

3. SUBJECT
Introducing a platform for the
practice of drama therapy
using a group therapy model.

4. PLACE & SETTING
 Sha’arMenashe Mental Health Center
(psychiatric hospital), forensic ward,
maximum security.
 Duration of group: One year.
 Group leaders: Co-led by a clinical
criminologist - drama therapist and a clinical
psychologist.

5. GROUP PARTICIPANTS
 Patients hospitalized in a locked ward under a court
order for committing crimes while in a psychotic
state.
 Patients with mental illnesses in remission and able
to differentiate between self and the character they
role played.
 Offenses ranged from drug trafficking, to domestic
violence, to manslaughter.

6. DIAGNOSES
Dual diagnosis patients suffering from
substance abuse and chronic
schizophrenia, schizoaffective
disorder, or personality disorder.

7. GROUP OBJECTIVE
To learn to cope constructively with anxiety
and personal issues when interviewed by the
multidisciplinary committee for potential
changes in status.

8. WHAT IS THE COMMITTEE?
•Amultidisciplinary group of medical and legal
professionals and patient’s family.
•It
assemble at least once each six months to interview
patients and decide issues of patient leave, release,
placement, and degree of independence and freedom.
o The committee’s impression of the patient’s interview,
along with the ward report, determines the patient’s
future.

9. THE PLAY PARADIGM
A THERAPEUTIC PLATFORM FOR DRAMA THERAPY
 This drama therapy group  Patients also experience
used a role play technique in roles that do not include
which patients assumed the violence or aggression.
roles of the committee
members which allowed them
to connect with their
authentic selves, their crimes,
and their relationships with
the role models via seeing
themselves through the eyes
of others.

10. THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS
 Each group therapy session  The role play allows
was a scenario of a committee patients a deeper
meeting in which one patient understanding of
acted as himself going before themselves as viewed
the committee and the other through the various
patients role played the various committee roles and a
committee members, such as deeper understanding of
psychiatrist, physician, attorney, others’ intent toward them.
and representatives from
hospital and family.

11. THERAPEUTIC ACHIEVEMENTS
 The group was a realistic scenario of  Patients assumed
the committee process. The different different roles to enable
committee roles represented various them to see
dimensions of the patient’s life from themselves through the
internal thoughts and feelings to perspectives of others
relationships with others and his and to reach diverse
community. He had to face personal insights.
issues in relation to roles in the
committee as they raised issues and
asked questions he had to answer
and discuss.

12. THE PLAY PARADIGM
A Therapeutic Platform

13. A THERAPEUTIC PLATFORM
THE PLAY PARADIGM
The Beginning
 The Play Paradigm was born out of my
personal therapy, my clinical work in the
field and in private, clinical supervision
given and received, being a student and a
lecturer, reading case studies, being a
human being, etc., where I noticed there
was a big gap between theory and
practice.
 In light of the power discrepancy between
therapist and patient; this gap concerned
me.
 The Play Paradigm emerged to address
this gap.

14. A THERAPEUTIC PLATFORM
THE PLAY PARADIGM
The Problem
 Although this is the era of post-modern
psychology and humanism, the use of play
therapy still involves the use of force via the
manipulation of patients to accept a specific
idea or viewpoint.
 The practice of classical psychology is
essentially unchanged despite the new clothes.
 This problem is difficult to change mainly for
two reasons. The first difficulty is that there is a
perception in the Western world that there are
many truths or that truth is multi-faceted. The
second difficulty is the Western concept of
duality or the either/or schema.

15. A THERAPEUTIC PLATFORM
THE PLAY PARADIGM
The proposed solution
 The purpose of the Play Paradigm framework
is to provide a solution for the difficulty in
implementing force-free treatment in this
post-modern and humanistic era.
 The Play Paradigm is not a technique but a
platform for implementing force-free such as
play therapy.
 This framework views the concept of truth as
a dynamic variable and the theoretical model
as non-dual.

16. THE PLAY PARADIGM IN ACTION

17. A THERAPEUTIC PLATFORM
THE PLAY PARADIGM –
The Objective
 Connecting the individual to his unique self
via a humanistic and phenomenological
approach in which the therapist does not
intervene but, rather, is vividly present,
experiencing, allowing, breathing, mirroring,
and undergoing parallel processes to the
patient.
 This is done under the premises that
connecting with the patient’s pre-verbal
stage is essential to group dynamics and
that the activity of play is an existential
component of our lives both in infancy and
adulthood.

18. A THERAPEUTIC PLATFORM
THE PLAY PARADIGM
Work platform
 The Western world’s practice of this
paradigm operates in accordance with a
binary model, taking into consideration
Western ways of thinking and the
dynamics between play, language, and
cognition.
Dialogue
 This platform invites mental health
professionals to become aware of the
Eastern world’s philosophy based ways
of thinking and encourages a dialogue.

19. A THERAPEUTIC PLATFORM
THE PLAY PARADIGM –
Rational
 Truth is not static.
 This paradigm is responsive to patient’s
changing dynamic truth. It reviews and
questions again and again our
perceptions of mental health and the
basic premises by which we provide
mental health treatment. It invites a new
and refreshing outlook.
 This paradigm is not static, but rather
regenerating, though its core elements
remain the same.

20. FOR MORE INFORMATION
CONTACT:
Dov Blum
Israel
Email: dovblum@place-to-be.co.il
052-5277726