Hartford Courant article about expressive puppetry

Puppets Are Gentle Therapy

July 18, 2005

By Regine Labossiere; Courant Staff Writer

Sometimes it takes more than a nurse’s trained touch or a doctor’s diagnosis to reach a hospice patient.

Sometimes it takes a puppet.

Marge Schneider calls herself the Puppet Lady and she is slowly changing the way a state hospice program orchestrates therapy.

Over the course of 20 years, she and her husband, David, have amassed a collection of hundreds of puppets that make up the “Puppet Zoo” in her backyard barn in Tolland.

“They’re small, but they serve their function of educational and whimsical fun and play,” said Schneider, 60.

For more than five years, she has been working for Hospice and Palliative Care of Connecticut, visiting with patients who are mostly elderly and suffer from dementia.

She brings with her puppets that could somehow connect with a patient’s past — maybe a baby that could remind a woman of motherhood, or a dog that could elicit memories of a past pet. Schneider, through the puppet, interacts with the patient in hopes that they will laugh or talk, anything that shows they are connecting with someone or something, and helps to break down the barriers of dementia and depression.

“I realized very early on they were very powerful therapeutic tools. I had a very intuitive sense of how to use them with different clients even though I wasn’t a psychiatrist,” Schneider said.

Hospice and palliative care officials say Schneider could be one of just a few people using puppetry to communicate with the elderly suffering from dementia or children who are terminally ill. She helped pilot the program in Connecticut and is training staff members to use the puppets as well.

“It’s kind of a gutsy question to ask, if we want someone to play with puppets,” said Tim Boon, vice president for Hospice and Palliative Care of Connecticut. “When I first came here and was told about it, I was a bit skeptical, of course.”

Boon started working with the hospice group four years ago, about a year after Schneider did. As the new vice president, he was coming into a system that had already allowed the puppet therapy program, but he wanted to justify its expense.

He went on a patient visit with Schneider, who was trying to communicate with someone who hadn’t spoken a word in seven or eight months, Boon said.

“With the puppet, she was actually able to say a few sentences and connect and cry,” Boon said. “I thought about the isolation that this person had felt for so long. To me, that has major value.”

Even though Schneider began visiting nursing homes about 20 years ago with her puppets, this form of therapy is not yet on everyone’s radar.

“It’s probably fairly unique,” said Richard Briggs, chair of the allied therapy section of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization. Briggs maintains contact with different hospice groups.

“I haven’t heard anyone using puppets in that way,” Briggs said from his California office. “I don’t know this person’s work, but I think it’s a positive thing that people are working and trying to develop ways to communicate and ways to engage people.”

About five or six years ago, Schneider approached Paul Trubey, director of counseling services of Hospice and Palliative Care of Connecticut.

“She basically came knocking on the door to see if there was any way to use the puppets in the hospice program. When I met her and saw the puppets and listened to her explain how the puppets could be used, I thought it was wonderful,” Trubey said.

Even though Trubey had approved, there were a few obstacles before Schneider could be hired full time.

“One of the biggest stumbling blocks for getting her on board and to also getting her to patients and families is the erroneous idea that what she’s doing is providing a kind of puppet show,” he said. “I think that’s the kind of thing that would first come to mind for most people.”

Nancy Pearce, a friend and social worker who met Schneider three years ago, said Schneider has the ability to connect directly with patients’ emotions rather than first working through the lack of rationale symptomatic of dementia.

“A person with dementia, their emotions are still totally intact,” Pearce said. “What the puppets do is cut straight through.”

The image of the puppet can click with the patient faster or better than words, Pearce said.

Schneider remembers one boy she helped come to terms with his multiple sclerosis before he died three years ago. The boy wouldn’t connect with his social workers and initially he wasn’t interested in puppets, but his social worker convinced him to give it a try, Schneider said.

“He was 15 years old and I’m an old, gray-haired woman — and puppets, that’s not cool for a teen,” she said. But, he came around, first asking for the tarantula to help him face his fears and then asking for all sorts of animals for which he had many trivia facts to share.

“He felt, what an injustice, dying at 15,” Schneider said.

Trubey said Schneider’s work has allowed the program to expand.

“We had nothing like that at all and it really opened the door to an acceptance of other complementary and alternative therapies, such as expressive arts,” Trubey said, adding that it is rare for hospice programs to have full-time expressive arts therapists as his program has. “I’m not sure that we would have gotten that approval to move ahead if it hadn’t been for Marge.”

Caption: PHOTO: (B&W), RICHARD MESSINA / THE HARTFORD COURANT

MARGE SCHNEIDER of Tolland uses puppets and music as therapeutic healing tools in working with patients suffering from depression or dementia. She says the puppets help to “bring out the inner child” of patients who don’t respond to conventional therapies. Schneider, who calls herself the Puppet Lady, has worked for more than five years for Hospice and Palliative Care of Connecticut.