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What’S Therapeutic About The Therapeutic Milieu?, Sandra Thomas, Mona Shattell, Tracey Martin

Mona Shattell

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 selfdestructiveness. Prominent aspects of patients’ experience within the place of refuge were …