Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Abstract

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neuropsychiatric disorders in childhood that often persists into adulthood. Recently new innovative art-based psychotherapies such as painting, dance, drama, art and music therapy offer ADHD children more treatment alternatives in reducing symptoms. In India till date there have not been any study that has evaluated the effectiveness of dance movement therapy (DMT) in reducing symptoms of ADHD children. After having screened for ADHD across 3 different schools, 60 children were randomly allotted to either DMT group or sham dance group. Sham dance group was kept as the control group. The intervention and the control groups had 30 participants each. Measures of ADHD were obtained using ADHD Rating Scale – IV wherein both parent and teacher versions were used. A related deficit commonly found among children with ADHD is emotion dysregulation. Hence emotion regulation was also measured using Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC). The two scales were administered before and after children underwent 12 weeks of respective interventions. The findings of the study concluded that DMT as a psychotherapeutic intervention was found to be effective in reducing the symptoms of ADHD

Biography

Gopika Govindan completed her Masters in Clinical and Abnormal Psychology from Swansea University, UK. She holds an MPhil in Clinical Psychology from Manipal University, India. In addition she has certificates in Dance Movement Therapy, Psychological Counselling and Neuro linguistic programming. She has worked in UK, UAE and India. She is currently the Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychologist at Neuropedia Children’s Neuroscience Center, Dubai.

E-mail: gopz06@gmail.com