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What's Therapeutic About The Therapeutic Milieu?, Sandra Thomas, M. Shattell, T. Martin

Faculty Publications and Other Works -- Nursing

While the milieu of an inpatient facility is considered a treatment modality, extant literature focuses on the staff's role in creating the milieu rather than the patient's perception of it. Not since Goffman's Asylums (1961) has there been an in-depth examination of the phenomenal world of the hospitalized psychiatric patient. In this study, eight inpatients (ages 23 to 58) on the acute psychiatric unit of a metropolitan general hospital participated in phenomenological interviews about their experience of the environment. The essential meaning of the hospital was refuge from self-destructiveness. Prominent aspects of patients' experience within the place of refuge were …