ABSTRACT
Introduction: The Sars-Covid-19 pandemic situation has placed services dedicated to the care and rehabilitation of patients with psychotic disorders in the face of the choice of which therapeutic resources should be provided "in-person" and which "remotely". The choice of the two authors was to maintain most of the group activities "in-person", binding the participants to all the restrictions set by the norms, and to translate "remotely" mainly the individual activities. This choice was the result of a reflection of the working group, stemming from concern that a practice carried out "remotely" and "in group" in an already extremely compromised group of patients might further impair the transformative effect of the treatment itself. The underlying hypothesis was that the lack of a real physical presence and the loss of sensory input that allow one to "listen to the patient with all the senses" (Bastianini, 2019) might affect the possibility to access pre-symbolic experiences, experiences that cannot be evoked and expressed in words and that usually emerge not through verbal and symbolic communication but through nonverbal one. Method(s): In particular, this consideration has been applied from the beginning to the Photolangage © group, in which participants are already stimulated by a verbal content and asked to find answers without the use of words, through the physical choice of some photos after a "silent observation" of a selection of images taken by the conductors from some dossier;just at a subsequent, participants are encouraged to translate their choice into word, and then to share all their reflections and feelings with the rest of the group. All these steps - seen as key elements of this kind of group setting - were considered "untranslatable" as a step of a "remote" setting for this kind of groupusers, while in other contexts (e.g., didactic field) they were adopted effectively by the two authors. Thus, the hypothesis is that it was the pathology and level of functioning of the targeted treatment subjects that was mandatory for the choice rather than administration procedure of the treatment itself. Result(s): Finally, despite the limitations given by the pandemic (e.g., use of devices before and during the group session, distancing, reduction of the number of participants), group members have expressed their gratitude for the guarantee of effective treatment, experiencing a continuity in the sense of being "taken care of" and "thought about" by services. "In-person" treatment also provided the fostering and maintaining moments of "good sociability" (Corbella, 2021) among group members, who often lack it due to the consequences of their pathology and at a time when the pandemic situation affected actually that dimension.