ABSTRACT
Background
Psychodrama is an experiential group psychotherapy that is used to enhance adolescents’ wellbeing. The COVID-19 pandemic forced the adaptation of this method to an online setting
Objective
This qualitative study investigated whether and how tele-psychodrama provides psychological support to adolescents, in order to better understand its strengths and weaknesses
Participants
14 adolescents from Northern and Central Italy
Method
14 interviews were conducted at the end of group tele-psychodrama treatment and were analysed with qualitative thematic analysis
Results
Three themes were identified: (1) contribution of tele-psychodrama to adolescents’ well-being; (2) implementation of psychodrama to the online setting; and (3) (the) shortcomings of tele-psychodrama
Conclusions
Despite the differences between online and in-person psychodrama, all the participants expressed their appreciation of group tele-psychodrama, which contributed to their overall psychological wellbeing and helped them process difficulties that emerged during the lockdowns.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Declarations of interest
The authors report no conflict of interest
Author contributions
Gianmarco Biancalani: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing; Hod Orkibi: Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing; Shoshi Keisari: Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing; Maria Silvia Guglielmin: Conceptualization, Methodology; Giuseppe Bertagna: Conceptualization, Methodology; Patrizia Meola: Conceptualization, Methodology; Davide Viezzoli: Data curation, Formal analysis, Software, Writing - original draft; Nicoletta Finco: Data curation, Formal analysis, Software; Ines Testoni: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing - review & editing.
All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.