Treating and Training: A 30 Year Experience of a Team with a Group-Analytic Framework: Part I

Abstract

The authors are currently responsible for the Day Hospital at the Psychiatric Service of the Department of Neurosciences, Psychiatry and Mental Health of the Hospital de Santa Maria, a large general and university hospital in Lisbon. They are the heiresses of a group of psychiatrists with group analytic training, who founded this Day Hospital and initiated its constitution in 1977, by adapting group analytic concepts to the treatment of patients in states of acute dis-compensation, as well as simultaneously investing in the post-graduate training of psychiatry and paedopsychiatry interns, psychologists and nurses. This training has been recently extended to medical students, on a regular basis. In Part I of this article, the authors will approach the importance of the senior technicians’ group analytic training, and of the essentially group functioning of the Day Hospital, as well as describe it, by characterizing the patients, the programme and the therapeutic and training tools of this therapeutic and training Unit, which is a reference in Portugal. In Part II, the authors will present a survey questionnaire that was elaborated with the aim of evaluating the training received during the 30 years of existence of this Unit. This questionnaire was sent to all the technicians who trained at the Day Hospital during the period between 1977 and 2007. The results will be presented as well as the conclusions of this research.