Allowing creative and playful movements on a kinesthetic bodily level within the DMT group can increase creativity on a cognitive level. The creativity afforded by the “open-endedness” and “freeness” of the relatively consequence-free play of DMT encourages people to improvise and try things out that they otherwise may have not been able to do in real life. Examples of include taking on new or alternate roles or imagining what would happen if one had different capabilities or behaved differently (Nussbaum, 2013, p. 119). DMT can be considered an “excursion into unknown places” (Tosey, 1992). The purpose of this study was to move the unknown, or to ‘wake up the bear’ by helping depressed adult patients wake from numbness to alertness by using DMT as a metaphor of healing, and transformation. The current pilot study examined the effectiveness of a Dance Movement Therapy group model on adults diagnosed with depression, seeing if the motivation to play increased a sense of affective vitality and alleviated their symptoms of depression.
The DMT group model developed and researched in 2018-2019 was divided into four stages. In the group, the trained therapist maintained a sense of flow and empathically reflected imagery and roles that were expressed or felt by patients. The therapist was present and actively participated in the action, making contact and engaging with the patients. Two questions guided the research:
1.To what extent does the DMT model lead to better results in comparison to the results of working in other available treatment-as-usual (TAU) group models?
2.To what extent does the special characteristic of the DMT model defined as “play” affect the treatment results of people diagnosed with depression?
It is assumed that patients diagnosed with depression and treated with DMT would achieve better results than TAU patients. It was believed that this affect would visible in a decrease in the symptoms of depression. Further, it was also assumed that there will be a direct link between the frequency of expressed vitality affect to the decrease in the symptoms of depression.
