On the 9th of June 2018 I had the pleasure of
facilitating a workshop for the Malaysian Medics International (MMI)
organization. There were about 24 participants, mostly comprised of medical
students, a few mental health professionals and academicians.
It was wonderful to witness so much creativity from the participants and the fun and joy which they had expressed during the workshop. I was also very encouraged by the level of curiosity of how Dramatherapy can be used in their practice with patients.
We obviously needed more than one hour and 15 minutes to get to that much of depth in the workshop. (Although it did get extended to two hours, with the permission of the persons organizing the conference as well as the participants, due to the level of engagement and the number of questions from the participants which I felt was important to address)
However, the level of the participants curiosity has led me to be even more encouraged in wanting to teach Dramatherapy as an elective in local universities… which I have been contemplating for about a couple of years now.. After all, I have been practicing and conducting workshops and training in the field for 14 years now… And especially since we have a change in government recently (after 60 whole years!) , there is a renewed hope in wanting to seriously pursue that possibility. I now dare to belief that offering to teach Dramatherapy as an elective in Universities in Malaysia may be seriously considered and implemented by the local universities on the basis of merit, without other political agendas.
My intention is that
the next time(perhaps in 2 years)
someone asks me how they can be trained to be a Dramatherapist, to confidently give a of
name of a local university , and not to tell them that they need to go to the US, UK or Europe
to be trained to become a fully qualified Dramatherapist.
So I am putting it out there… if any Universities in
Malaysia is interested in that possibility of offering Dramatherapy as an
elective to begin with, (perhaps later, to offer the full MA in Dramatherapy) please send me a message on creative.movements@gmail.com
Meanwhile, look out on this space for my next Dramatherapy
Skills Training workshop.
These are some of the feedback from the participants of the workshop:
“I had so much fun and really like this workshop”
“It is good to see that the arts can be used to help people
facing mental health challenges”
“How can I learn more?”
“It is very interesting to see how Dramatherapy can take
difficult issues and deal with it while having a lot of fun in the process!”
