Specialist Dramatherapist

As a clinician, the post holder provides and evaluates assessment and treatment services with adults referred for complex, severe and enduring mental health problems including personality disorder, complex trauma and psychoses. They ascertain risk, needs and suitability for individual, group, other psychological therapies as a whole and specialist arts therapies, communicating with the whole range of other professionals involved.

As a senior specialist clinician the post holder works jointly with professionals to deliver assessment and care consultation, considering the range of psychological therapies, provides individual and group dramatherapy assessments and treatment, care coordination, and care consultancy in complex cases.

Analyse and clarifies factors or risk e.g. self-harm, level of functioning, capacity to engage in therapeutic work, unmet needs and support systems to determine the patients complex need and capacities to undertake the treatment mode.

To provide specialised assessment of service users referred for the range of psychological therapies jointly with art therapy and psychological therapies to determine which service will meet their therapeutic needs.

To make decisions and recommendations regarding the treatment of service users with complex mental illnesses through investigative assessment processes and to use interpretive skills to understand complex behaviours and psychological function.

To plan, monitor and deliver specialised programmes of care for the treatment of a case load of service users experiencing complex and enduring mental illness.

To provide dramatherapy interventions, group or individual as appropriate through sensitive and expert application of arts psychotherapeutic techniques to service users assessed as able to engage in therapeutic work, whether brief or longer term. Standardised outcome measures and evidence based practice interpretation is part of this.

To work to agreed activity standards including duration of intervention

To be able to contain at time highly emotive and distressing clinical material (i.e. sexual abuse and other trauma). To enable the service user to disclose painful material, in order to progress the course of treatment where appropriate.

To have the highly specialised skills and understanding to help service user in group and individual treatment, either brief or longer term, to disclose, process and resolve conflicts within themselves and with others.