Ines Testoni is psychologist, philosopher, psychodramatist and psychotherapist. She is Associate Professor of Social Psychology at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology (FISSPA) of the University of Padua. She is director of the Master in Death Studies & The End of Life, scientific director of the Conferences organized by Endlife.it (www.endlife.psy.unipd.it), author of many national and international operas and member of national and international Scientific Associations. Her main fields of research are psychology of loss, death and mourning; social psychology of the sociatry phenomena and their management through psychodramatic practices; psychology of gender differences, with a focus on gender-based violence. She leaded some European projects.
Lucia Ronconi is expert in statistical multivariate analysis applied in psychological field. She participated in many international projects, developing research aimed at describing structural models useful in clinical psychological interventions.
Psychodrama and art-therapy, with regard to their psychosocial application as sociodrama and educational creative activities, are excellent preventive strategies for promoting well-being in adolescence, against death anxiety and alexithymia. Indeed, they facilitate the elaboration of profound themes and emotions, characterizing the adolescents’ existential problems, which are not sufficiently token in charge by adults, both parents and teachers. The study presents the results of a research-intervention, focused of the importance of health/well-being and the inevitability of death, realized in 6 Italian high schools, involving 534 students. The experience allows to the area of death education, aimed at preventing depression, suicide and self-injuring behavior. The project focused on death, afterlife and spirituality and utilized psychodrama, artistic performances and meditation in order to cope with fear of death, its ontological representations, and alexithymia. The intervention encompassed both the discussions on the sense of death and on spiritual contents, aimed at opening the horizon of the afterlife. After psychodramatic activities, some art-therapy and meditative experiences aimed at representing the interior immensity followed. At the end of the training, the students were invited to work in group to create films and pictures, describing what happened in their mind/soul. All the artistic products were exposed in the final school exhibitions. The purpose of the study, therefore, was to survey high school students about their relationships among death anxiety, alexithymia, representations of death and spirituality, before and after the intervention. The Testoni Death Representation Scale (TDRS) (Testoni et al., 2015), The Collett-Lester Fear of Death Scale (Collett & Lester, 1969; Lester, 2004; Lester, Abdel-Khalek, 2003, The World Health Organization Quality Of Life – Spirituality, Religiousness and Personal Beliefs (WHOQOL-SRPB) (Skevington, Gunson, and O’connell, 2013) and The Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS)(Bagby, Parker, & Taylor,1994) were utilized. The results showed that the course did not increase death anxiety, while reduced alexithymia and modified the ontological representation of death.
