Il Progetto IDEAS – Interventi Drammatico-Espressivi Asperger’s Syndrome
Solari Silvano
The IDEAS project was conceived in La Spezia at the beginning of 2012 in order to meet the demands expressed by a number of parents of children with Asperger’s syndrome, who were worried about their children’s severe and persistent difficulties in expressing themselves, especially at a non-verbal level. The project then took off in Viareggio, where a two-phased study took place between 2013 and 2014. This resulted in the emergence of some interesting data, which, in one way or another, confirm what was previously established by Matthew D. Lerner and collaborators (Amori Yee Mikami and Karen Levine) in an article from 2011, published in this journal in May 2012. This study, which is scientifically extremely accurate, regards an intervention called SDARI (Socio-dramatic affective-relational intervention), through which nine adolescents with AS and HFA, belonging to an experimental group, really improve on an expressive level, using interactions developed from so-called «improvisational theatre». This particular theatrical principle also represents the central core of IDEAS, due to participation in the interventions by the psychologist Pierfilippo Macchiavelli, who, in collaboration with a psychotherapist and expert in Autism (Silvano Solari), enabled real integration between dramatic spontaneity and psychotherapy.
