Working with People Experiencing Psychosis

• Gestalt Therapy and Mental Health Care: Part 2. by Brian O'Neill, 11/5/96
  • In Response to ..Part 2 by John Clark , 11/24/96
    
    

John,

Hello and welcome to the Forum! I agree with what you have said in your post and in part 2 of my posting I was simply throwing up points for discussion. I have talked with quite a few Gestalt therapists and other psychotherapists who have not worked with people experiencing psychosis, and who are reluctant and even against working in a gestalt way with people experiencing these disorders. There is very little literature in Gestalt therapy about working with people experiencing psychosis apart from some articles by Wilson Van Dusen and a few others, and Van Dusen states that *still even Fritz failed with my average client, the chronic psychotic* (Van Dusen,W. 1975, page 115).

My experience teaches me that the applicability of any psychotherapy to a particular type of disorder experienced by a person, will be mediated by the ground of experience of the therapist in working in that area.

I am particularly interested how the literature on Case Management in Mental Health, Therapeutic Alliance and Gestalt therapy overlap in so many areas and yet little has been written. I was recently at the Australian and New Zealand Mental Health Services Conference and one of the keynote speakers, a psychologist, survivor of schizophrenia and a noted consumer activist, talked at lenght on the work of Martin Buber. She sounded very gestalt to me!

So here we are off on a discussion, and I am getting to write about one of my key interests... Gestalt therapy and Case Management in Mental health. If you are interested I'll post some lecture notes and quotes I have for these topics.

Reference

W.Van Dusen, The Perspective of an Old Hand, in gestalt is, edited by John O Stevens, Real People Press, Utah, 1975

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