AbstractsPsychology

Karakter – a child- and adolescent psychiatric hospital - is implementing a new way of working: high & intensive care (HIC). The HIC offers the most intensive treatment, whenever ambulatory care does not work any more. Patients are admitted when they become a danger to themselves and to others. In the HIC it is important to have respect for the patient, so he or she is approached in a hospital way. When unusual stress temporarily renders a patient unable to direct life effectively, a psychological crisis occurs. Different phases can be described in a crisis, in which the patient shows different behaviours and has different emotions. The new HIC department of Karakter in Nijmegen will have a new room: the comfort room. The comfort room is place in the HIC where patients can use calming techniques on their own initiative in order to cope with a psychological crisis. The goal of this graduation project is to design a product for the comfort room of the new high & intensive care department in Nijmegen that supports patients coping with a psychological crisis. In order to design this product, it is necessary to question if design can support coping in this situation. By using different research methods, including observing patients at the HIC and contextmapping with patients and sociotherapists, the patient’s experience of being admitted to the HIC and different coping strategies were investigated. Positive feelings of being admitted to the HIC are the secure and safe environment, and the fact that patients always have someone to go to. Negative feelings include the insecurity towards their situation at home, having no control over their actions, and a lack of stimulation. Additionally, the researcher identified 6 categories of coping strategies patients can use to cope with a crisis situation: balance social interaction, focus, find joy, escape and release energy. It can be concluded that design can support coping with a psychological crisis. This design intervention should make the coping experience positive. It does so by fulfilling the patient’s concerns towards the situation of being admitted to the HIC. A conflict between two of these concerns has been found: the patients feel good in the stable and safe environment (security), but they feel locked up and restrained in their possibilities as well (autonomy). This was the starting point for the design goal: ‘I want to increase the subjective wellbeing of patients at the HIC, by letting them experience both security and autonomy during a psychological crisis, which allows them to grow in their coping abilities with a crisis’ To accomplish this design goal, the interaction between the product and user should be explorative, controlling, reliable, focused and joyous. The designer discovered that the patients would use a product differently in different phases of the crisis: when they are frustrated or angry, they want to release their negative physical energy into an object; but when they are feeling more anxious or psychotic, they need something that structures…