Elizabeth Prempeh
Germany

Patients often arrive in our emergency room with vague somatic complaints—general weakness, body pain, even psychogenic non-epileptic seizures—yet every single lab and study comes back normal. I have come to understand how large a role stress plays, and how essential it is to treat emotions, even though as physicians we tend to default to pharmacological solutions for anything affecting the nervous system. The deeper truth is that physical recovery often depends on emotional resolution first—and increasingly, modern life makes that resolution harder to find. Public health data links heavy, passive screen time to a significantly higher risk of depressive symptoms,¹ suggesting that solitary consumption of content may leave this emotional need unmet rather than answered.

It was on this very principle that theaters for healing were built long ago. In ancient Greece, the theater of Epidaurus was constructed within the sacred precinct of the Asclepieion, dedicated to Asclepius, the god of medicine.² They understood something we often overlook today. Aristotle defined katharsis as the emotional purging of pity and fear elicited through dramatic art.³ Patients traveling to the Asclepieion underwent healing rituals that combined somatic treatments with theatrical engagement, because they believed emotional catharsis was necessary to restore the body’s balance.

Modern neurobiology increasingly backs up this ancient intuition. Sitting in a darkened, shared auditorium while watching a narrative unfold changes autonomic nervous system activity. Studies measuring biological markers of collective cultural participation show a measurable drop in salivary cortisol, directly easing systemic stress responses.⁴ In the moments when my clinical world and my personal one overlap, I find medical images bleeding into ordinary experience—glancing at a kernel of popped corn and recognizing, unmistakably, the lobulated structure of a brain cavernoma on MRI. Beyond these small visual collisions, the cinema offers something more concrete: a real neurobiological break that lets us process complex emotional narratives without real-world consequences, dampening an overactive fight-or-flight response.

That same instinct is alive today, not only as metaphor but as practice, returning the therapeutic power of performance to its original, live form. Organizations like Broadway Hearts bring professional stage performers directly to the bedsides of hospitalized children, turning hospital corridors into temporary stages.⁵ Playback Theatre practitioners do something similar, performing improvised, patient-led scenes right at the bedside, handing a patient’s own words and experience back to them through live performance.⁶ These are not isolated acts of goodwill, but rather a return to what the Asclepieion always assumed: a body heals more completely once the mind has been allowed to feel witnessed, moved, or briefly carried somewhere else.

O’Sullivan notes that a biological marker is often what it takes for a patient’s suffering to be believed at all.⁷ If the absence of a visible marker can make suffering harder to validate, its presence should not be the only thing that makes healing possible. Sometimes the most effective thing we can offer a patient is not a prescription but a witness—something or someone that lets a patient feel emotionally seen before we ask their body to recover. Bringing both cinema and live theater into hospital life, whether through ward movie nights, bedside visits from performers, or discussion groups after a performance, offers exactly that: a gentle, non-pharmacological bridge built on connection rather than chemistry alone. In restoring these communal, narrative spaces to healthcare, we are not doing something new. We are returning to the oldest connection medicine ever had with art—remembering that listening was always part of the treatment.

References

1. Madhav KC, Sherchand SP, Sherchan S. Association between screen time and depression among US adults. Preventive Medicine Reports. 2017;8:67-71. doi:10.1016/j.pmedr.2017.08.005.
2. Gesler WM. Therapeutic Landscapes: Theory and a Case Study of Epidauros, Greece. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 1993;11(2):171-189.
3. Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin Books; 1996.
4. Fancourt D, Williamon A. Attending a concert reduces glucocorticoids, progesterone and the cortisol/DHEA ratio. Public Health. 2016;132:101-104. doi:10.1016/j.puhe.2015.12.005.
5. Broadway Hearts. Accessed September 2026. https://broadwayhearts.org/
6. Patterson K. Acting Out in Hospital Corridors: Playback Theatre in a Medical Setting. Centre for Playback Theatre. https://playbacktheatre.org/
7. O’Sullivan S. The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness. London: Picador; 2021.