What makes a circle safe, and what goes wrong when it isn’t?
Effects of large group awareness training on participants’ psychiatric status
Adjacent
Psychiatric interviews with more than 300 people who had taken a large group awareness training found no psychiatric casualties and only a few stress reactions.
Large group awareness trainings are personal-growth workshops run for large audiences. Lieberman, an author of the Stanford encounter-group study (Yalom & Lieberman (1971)), assessed two cohorts of participants with clinical interviews and the Diagnostic Interview Schedule. Among more than 300 people he found no psychiatric casualties and only a few stress reactions.
Set beside the Stanford figures, it is a reminder that a casualty rate belongs to a particular kind of group and the people in it, not to groups in general.
What it doesn’t show
Personal-growth trainings for large audiences, not Circling. The abstract is two sentences long and gives few details, such as how long after the training people were interviewed. Participants had chosen to attend the trainings.
Summary based on the abstract.
Directions that build on it
- Safety, facilitation and harm
Links
Cite
Lieberman, M. A. (1987). Effects of large group awareness training on participants’ psychiatric status. American Journal of Psychiatry, 144(4), 460–464. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.144.4.460