This book highlights, retrieves, and recalls the significance and usefulness of a network of collaborations and a way of working that I have followed for years, recognizing its positive outcomes, simply because I considered it self-evident, without full awareness and consciousness. Perhaps because I belonged to the generation of psychiatrists who believed in and promoted connective psychiatry, cooperation between different scientific fields, and the effectiveness of interdisciplinary teams.
In many cases, drama therapy, cognitive therapy, and family therapy act as interconnected vessels and as parts of a broader system that influence each other, often developing a kind of flirtation between them. The process itself serves as a lesson for children, a lesson in collaboration, mutual understanding, and companionship—an essential lesson for today's children in an age of extreme competition, absolute loneliness, and prevailing narcissism.
Let us adopt their proposal to overcome our personal fixations and stereotypes, to learn to function as a team, to encompass the aggression and destructiveness of children, aiming to transform them into creativity, taking on the role of the "good enough mother." Let us provide a new perspective for the school and the family of tomorrow by recognizing our new flexible, interchangeable, and complementary roles. Let us work together for the development of the "tree of life."
Stelios Krasanakis MD
Contents
Foreword by Sue Jennings 11
Foreword of the Greek edition 15
Thanks 18
First Part: Introduction 19
Who is this book for? 19
How can it be useful? 20
The contents: pieces of the puzzle 21
Why this book now? 23
What is the goal of this book 27
What this book cannot do 27
Who we are and why we wrote this book 28
Second Part: A drama therapy approach 33
What is drama therapy? 33
How does it work? 37
How does it work in education? 54
Third Part: An approach to family therapy 67
What is family therapy? 67
How does it work? 79
How does it work in education? 88
Fourth Part: An interdisciplinary team in practice 99
How does an interdisciplinary center work? 99
What is an interdisciplinary support team? 106
How does it operate? The process of an interdisciplinary support team 109
What are the challenges? 119
Fifth Part: Working together 123
Drama therapy and family therapy in practice 123
Conclusion: The overall picture 177
Why therapy works in an interdisciplinary approach 177
How the pieces connect 185
More than a sum 186
Bibliography 189
Index of terms 193
Index of authors 199
