F. van Hest: Holiday experiences with psychiatric patients

An active holiday with a mixed group of psychiatrie patients — mostly younger men and women with a diversity in duration of hospital-admission and diagnosis — had on them two important effects:
On the subjective point of view there was the experience (concerning patients and staff) that they had a pleasant time together; objectively there was a manifestation of a number of behaviour improvements. Two facts were mainly responsible for this favourable situation. First there was the development of an open group-situation with a large integration between patients and staff, this in contrast with the situation in a hospital where the roles of patients and staff, relatively are widely withdrawn. The frankness of the group extended itself to the social happenings, because the groupmembers feit free in their movements. Also in contrast to the hospitalisationsituation, they seldom were part of a 'crowd'. With the security of the total group on the background, patients, often with staff, divided into various small sub-groups, each of these groups going their own way. On their own initiative, individualy or in (small-)groups, they now found the possibility to explore their social and spatial surroundings. Their welf-conditioned hospital behaviour now turned over to a selection behaviour. Subjective contentment and behaviour corrections were also strengthened by the continuing stream of natural activities exposed to the holidaymakers. Different from their way of living, which enclose hospitalisation and stereotyped character-shape, the patient, being exposed to his natural environment is asked to be continually inventive and active. This form of activity works structurated to the behaviour without being experienced as an authority/laid-up or as useless/silly.
By way of hypothesis it is supposed that the senso-motorial apparatus of human-being is built to regularly interact us with some new stimulance.
something that we, in a psychiatry hospital, often find impossible to realize.
The experience with patients is leaving us with the following conclusion:
a) the open form of 'group-nursing' with just a little social distance between patient and staff in most cases, seems to be the perfect way of nursing mentally-sick patients. In this form of nursing, the eight-hour day and the five-day week, taken over from our trade and industry, seems to be an absurdity.
b) as to where the accent in the socio-therapy often depends in environmentconstantion, it is desired, more frequently than ever before, to handle environment- alterations as a therapeutic instrument, specially when this happens in a form of offering possibilities to the patient, to confront himself with a stream of through nature given activities, as they for instance, are found during an active holiday.