The Power of Theater Expression and Communication: A Psychological Theraputical Intervention in a Refugee Camp: An IPA Study Into the Narratives of Women Refugees’ Experience With Drama Therapy

Forced displacement poses a major global crisis that must be tackled at all levels: political, socio-economic, and psychological. This paper describes the psychological impact of forced displacement on women and explains the significance of drama therapy intervention (DTI) in treating and empowering trauma impacted refugee women. Frequently used to treat immigrant and refugee adolescents and children in many host communities, DTI is seldom applied to women refugees who suffer from psychological disorders compounded by fleeing their home country and by difficulties faced in host communities. This makes our study the first on women refugees leaving a zone of war and residing in dire conditions in refugee camps. To best analyze the impact of DTI, this study (1) utilizes a qualitative approach to explain the effects of drama therapy intervention on Syrian and Palestinian-Syrian refugee women in Lebanon; (2) It applies a modified five-phase DTI program to fit the experiment setting and conducts post-DTI interviews; (3) It uses interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) method to identify emergent themes and to analyze the effectiveness of DTI; (4) Finally, the study concludes that drama therapy can both help refugee women deal with war-related/post-migration emotional trauma and can implement positive changes and help its participants form social bonds among each other.