Review: Outreach psychotherapy and mental health

Aims:

The project deals with specific methodical work including vulnerable families within an outreach setting relating to the framework of the "Therapeutic Ambulatory Family Care" (TAF) (orig. German: Therapeutisch ambulante Familienbetreuung”)  in Salzburg.

The main background of the research project are the theories and practices of J.L. Moreno, who describes psychotherapy as a consolidation of people experiencing problems or conflicts together. The aim of psychotherapy in this sense is to gain a new understanding of these encounters within a therapeutic setting/using therapeutic action.

Specific objectives:

• The characterization of the approach using the real social atom.
• The apprehension of specific techniques
• The development of an understanding regarding inhibitory and beneficial factors impacting on the implementation of interventions.
• The theoretical reflection and foundation of used techniques.
• The comprehension beyond psychodrama, thereby exploring experiences of other therapeutic directions adopting the approach using the real social atom.
• The development of general proposals and recommendations for the approach using the real social atom

Context and methods:

The research plan suggests a multi-level approach.

1. The selection of supervised families in the sense of "theoretical sampling"
2. The identification of social atoms in form of network cards
3. Evaluation of therapy protocols
4. Conducting narrative interviews with the families
5. The inclusion of other psychotherapeutic concepts which are not related to psychodrama.
6. Measuring the success of psychotherapy within the selected families using a quantitative instrument

Results:

The presented research program allows to form statements about meaningful and necessary disorder-specific modifications of psychodrama within the approach using the real social atom.

Psychodrama has known this approach since it has been established by its founder, J. L. Moreno, nevertheless a consistent theory building had not existed yet. Initial strategies, but also the description of in-depth therapeutic work on role ascriptions and role expectations are further results.