The Assessment of self-esteem before and after a therapeutic milieu programme

Abstract

The present quasi-experimental study was conducted in ward G22, a milieu therapy unit at Cape Town’s Groote Schuur Hospital. It examines self-esteem of patients prior to and subsequent to completion of the therapeutic milieu programme, using a self-report questionnaire, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale. This questionnaire was used to measure the level of self-esteem after completion of a 9-12 week stay in G22. The questionnaire was administered to twenty-three successive patients admitted to the unit. Of these one terminated prematurely by committing suicide, while the questionnaire was re-administered to the remaining twenty-two subjects in the final week of their treatment. Protocols were computer scored and quantitatively analysed using Wilcoxon Rank Sum and Signed Rank tests of significance. This analysis indicated that there was a general improvement in self-esteem of subjects after completion of the therapeutic milieu programme, while there was a significant improvement in self-esteem of older subjects when compared with the younger subjects. Other variables such as language, gender and length of stay did not significantly affect the results.