Resolving a Crisis in the Activities Therapy Department

The decentralization of a private, psychoanalytically oriented hospital placed the activities therapy department in an increasingly isolated position; as a result the department developed a major crisis in its relationships with the rest of the hospital, its morale, and its professional identity. With strong support from the hospital director, the activities therapists were able to take part in exploratory meetings, and then in a six-month series of departmental meetings, to work out a new philosophy and a proposal for reorganizing the department. In the model finally adopted, department members function both as teachers and as diagnostician-therapists.