Behavior: 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Another youngster, Lorene, who lives in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, was so withdrawn before being exposed to poetry therapy that she stayed out of school, refused treatment for her disfiguring facial eczema and sought escape in alcohol.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.