Teleplay Therapy

What Is Teleplay?

Explaining what teleplay is, is one of the first things you are likely to have to address with parents, students, supervisees and children alike. This will be the foundation of the relationship for parents and children and of the approach for students and supervisees. As critical as it is to describe what teleplay is; it is also important to discuss what it is not.

Some practitioners were using teleplay prior to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. However once the outbreak revved up and many localities in the United States and other countries had stay at home orders or at least guidelines, most child and play therapists found themselves adapting what they were doing in play therapy to virtual sessions.

One of the many challenges to providing virtual play therapy sessions, which now is widely considered as teleplay, was that there was a dearth in the research literature to guide the clinical and ethical practice of teleplay; and that still exists at the time of the writing of this chapter. That case is true, as well, for the provision of the clinical supervision of teleplay. Additionally, because few practitioners were using it and few supervisors were providing supervisees and students with support for teleplay practice, even anecdotal aspects of this work were difficult to find.

Teleplay practitioners started connecting to other play therapists all over the world through social media, virtual meetings, trainings, and supervision. The benefits, limits and challenges, as well as the specific and technical approaches to doing play therapy virtually were trending. In essence, the professional mental health community was defining, creating and evaluating teleplay simultaneously.

There are currently at least 19 different terms used by regulatory boards that refer to what is widely considered as telemental health services (Hitty et al. 2017). Hitty et al. (2017), argue that telebehavioral health is viewed as the most inclusive term because it includes the virtual treatment of addictions. Although a singular comprehensive definition of teleplay or teleplay therapy continues to be allusive in the greater play therapy field there are several definitions that encompass the delivery of professional mental health services using telecommunications technologies. For our purposes and simplicity, teleplay therapy refers to the use of a systematic approach to play therapy using play and play therapy interventions in a virtual context by a professional mental health practitioner expressly trained in play therapy. Teleplay would refer to use of the systematic approaches to play therapy and use of play therapy interventions, the difference in teleplay is that the clinician has not been specifically trained in play therapy. The terms teleplay and teleplay therapy will be used mostly interchangeably in this chapter unless where specifically noted.