Poetry Therapy

In their efforts to understand the mental illnesses they treat, therapists sometimes encourage their patients to express themselves in painting, music, dance and drama. Now they are turning to yet another art form: poetry.

Across the U.S., according to the current issue of the Sciences, there are now about 3,500 mental patients, prison inmates, troubled students and nursing-home residents who are reading and writing poetry under the guidance of some 400 psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers and specially trained English teachers. These programs have shown so much promise that formal training in poetry therapy is now available. Indiana University of Pennsylvania is planning a three-week summer course in the subject, and Indiana Northern University, in conjunction with GROW (Group Relations Ongoing Workshops) in Manhattan, is preparing to grant a master's degree in the new field.

Patients in poetry therapy are encouraged to read verse, write it, or both. The technique seems to be effective in both individual and group treatment, probably because serious poems usually touch on deep, universal emotions. According to Yale Psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg, a patient who suddenly deciphers the message of a great poet may experience a flash of understanding similar to the dramatic insight that can come to patients in ordinary psychotherapy. By writing an original poem, an inhibited, repressed person may tell his doctor much that was previously secret. Poetry, says Rothenberg, "is even more revelatory than dreams."

Writing verses can help "hostile and disruptive students control their chaotic emotions," Sciences reports. One such student, an ex-addict at Manhattan's Washington Irving High School, wanted to hit people, leave school or begin mainlining again to get back at guidance counselors who, she felt, had misled her with false hopes. Encouraged to substitute words for deeds, the girl raged in verse: "I don't like what you've done/ I'll put you all up against the wall/ And execute you all./ I'll have you destroyed./ Remember, it's you all/ I intend to kill." Having vented her anger in this and other verse, she became less hostile.

Another youngster, Lorene, who lives in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, was so withdrawn before being exposed to poetry therapy that she stayed out of school, refused treatment for her disfiguring facial eczema and sought escape in alcohol. Visited at home by English Teacher Morris Morrison, she began to respond and cooperate when he read her two lines from Emily Dickinson, "I'm Nobody! Who are you?/ Are you--Nobody --too?" "In Emily Dickinson," Morrison explains, "Lorene could identify with someone as lonely as herself." Eventually Lorene went for skin treatment and returned to school.

Cry for Help. Poetry always offers clues to the mind of its creator, but those clues are not often as explicit as the suicidal lines of a 15-year-old boy whose fate became known to English Professor Abraham Blinder-man of the State University of New York. Blinderman thinks that the boy's teacher should have recognized his deep distress, and he believes that if the youngster had been in poetry therapy, his eloquent poem (see box) would have been understood as a cry for help. In that case, psychiatric treatment might have saved him. As it was, his cry went unheeded, and two years later he committed suicide.

Just as poetry can predict suicide, so it can also provoke it. That, says Psychiatrist Jack Leedy, president of the Association for Poetry Therapy, is one danger of the method in unskilled hands. Reading somber verses with upbeat endings can help unhappy patients by demonstrating that "others have been depressed and have recovered," but despairing poems may deepen the feelings of hopelessness. Psychiatrist Rothenberg cites another danger: poetry used only to get rid of intense feelings can keep a patient from understanding and resolving his conflicts. "Poetry by itself does not cure," he warns. But used by properly trained therapists, he says, it has an advantage over the other arts because it encourages "verbalization, the lifeblood of psychotherapy."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.