All the World's a Stage: Theatre Workshops Experience in Mental Health

The present work is aimed to describe the experience of the activities developed in the theatre group resulting from the project of culture and university extension entitled "Theatre and Mental Health", which started in 2010. It is a qualitative and descriptive study of the theater group development and the results obtained through the project. The reading of the results arising from the exploration of group facilitators experience, associated with material obtained from post-activity discussions resulted in three categories: “When the curtain rises: the group”; “The staging of me and us”; and “The backstage”. It was verified that, by stimulating different general skills, such as creativity, attention, orientation, memory, reasoning, reflection, sensitivity, vocal and body expression, setting up elements for a more contextualized professional-patient relationship. In addition, through the participants perception, it was possible to arise meanings, emotions, experience exchanges and stimulate cognitive behavioral development and social skills of each participant, whose experiences were unveiled as a reference for daily situations. It was noticed that the theater is a social change tool, so it is considered important to use it more frequently in clinical and therapeutic environments, as well as to stimulate the interest of more health researchers to conduct approaches on the impacts of Art in these contexts