Play_Therapy

    Everyone knows that James W. Ziglar, Seargent-At-Arms of the United States Senate, was hit by a freight train in his backyard when he was six. But not everyone knows that a then-revolutionary recovery method called “play therapy” was instrumental to his rehabilitation. “There’s no way that I’d be able to say all those Senators names on a daily basis without the play therapy I was given,” said Ziglar in a recent interview with Playboy magazine. “I’d fall asleep faster than a senior citizen watching Bambi.” This shows just how far we have come in this fascinating field in just a few decades.

Early Versions of Play Therapy
     Play therapy is a fairly new technique, evolving from the now extinct technique of “torture therapy”. Torture therapy utilized the stern and forceful methods of child rehabilitation made popular by the Marquis De Sade in the fourteenth century. “You’d prick the kid with needles, or hit him repeatedly with a piece of concrete until he got better,” says Dr. Emil Van Hottentooten. “It’s now understood that the kid wasn’t really better, he would just say so to get you to stop poking him with needles. A lot of human life was needlessly wasted.” Other methods included duct taping the child to a wall, cutting him off from his parents (and indeed all other forms of life) for months on end, locking them in dank, sewage-ridden basements, or sometimes all of the above. These practices began to be frowned upon by the late 1800’s, when statistics began emerging that showed such primitive examples of play therapy had a success rate of 0.4%. “You’d get the occasional kid who got better,” says Van Hottentooten, “but for the most part they just went insane. They’d gnaw their own hands or legs off, which would require them to be sewed back on, which would require more torture therapy. It really was a vicious circle.”
      Such methods were brought into the “modern” age in the early 20th century, when doctors tried something new. “With the invention of electricity,” says Van Hottentooten, “you had a broad new range of options to rehabilitate a child.” Children were strapped into electric-chair-like apparatuses, and 100-volts would be sent through them, sometimes for hours on end. “It wasn’t a lot of electricity,” says Van Hottentooten, “just enough to be really damn annoying. Of course, when you do it for such extended periods of time, it really starts to get frustrating.”
     Even this modern technology, however, could not raise the success rate of early play therapy. Dr. Emil Schnookylumps of the North Baltimore School of Kids and Stuff says the failure can be blamed on the fact that instead of nurturing and caring for the children in their time of need, the doctors were torturing and horrifying them. “We now know that children want to be loved and cared for in the time of a crisis, not strapped to walls or electrocuted,” says Dr. Schnookylumps. “As soon as we realized that, it was a whole new ballgame.”
The revolution began with Dr. Emil Tosspot’s now-legendary “Ball vs. Pencil Sharpener” experiments in 1957. Tosspot would take a child who was being rehabilitated and sit him in a room with only a red rubber ball and a pencil sharpener. Tosspot would then ask the child whether he would rather play with the ball or have his fingers forced into the pencil sharpener and ground off. Amazingly, all 400 of the test subjects chose the ball. Similar studies began popping up at other hospitals throughout the country, such as Dr. Emil Fuddrucker’s “Board Game vs. Hacksaw” experiments, and Dr. Emil Horseradish’s “Play-Doh vs. Swift Kick in the Gut” experiments. Inevitably, the child would choose the toy over the torture. It took scientists only ten more years to realize that radical new changes in therapy needed to be made.
     Dr. Tosspot was assassinated by Armenian Nationals in 1961**, and the Dr. Emil Tosspot Hospital for the Non-Torturing of Little Kids was built through his estate. It revolutionized modern play therapy. Doctors and Nurses would play games with the children in a nurturing and loving environment, thus aiding the children’s recovery. The success rate for recovery skyrocketed to 78% in 1963, up from just 1.2% in 1955. Dr. Van Hottentooten credits the success rate to the lack of mental and physical abuse heaped upon children with the new system. “You’ve got a kid who just had his appendix out,” says Van Hottentooten, “and you need to get him better. Now in the old method, you bathe him in ice-cold water for six hours a day, while dumping peroxide in his eyes. With the new method, you’d give him a spirograph or a Lite Bright and let him play. It was a much more enjoyable experience, and helped to speed the recovery.”
Today, torture therapy is all but extinct, practiced only in certain poverty-stricken developing countries, and parts of the Bronx.

Experiments in Play Therapy
      The play therapy method was very trial and error at first. In early experiments, monkeys were used instead of humans in an effort to gauge the response to certain methods of treatment. It was later discovered that this method provided false results, since monkeys utilize a different emotional level than humans. “You hit a monkey with a frying pan, he’ll just keep coming back for more. They’re pretty stupid,” says Dr. Emil Hulapopper of the Various Experiments with Mokeys Institute. “Not like a kid. No, you hit a kid with a frying pan, and that little bugger just won’t shut up.”
     New experiments were developed using actual human children. Some methods would work fine, such as small group play and one-on-one games, but other methods would produce lackluster and even negative results.
The so-called Lombardi Method pitted two teams of six children apiece in a full-scale game of tackle football. Serious injuries were not uncommon, and some children, such as those confined to wheelchairs, would be ridiculed for their inability to play the game. “We had one kid who had his legs amputated,” said one doctor, “and he had only been in his wheelchair a few days. He could barely keep himself upright, much less play football. He was kicked in the head several times.” Similar methods of play therapy, such as the Ben Jones method, the Rocket Richard method, and the Hulk Hogan method failed just as miserably.
      Another method now frowned upon is the Gaming Therapy, in which the child is given full access to casinos and off-track betting parlors. The methodology was simple; get the children’s mind off rehabilitation by distracting them with gambling. The theory also existed that the children could even help with their own medical fund with their winnings. Unfortunately, several things happened to crush the enthusiasm behind this method. The first was that many children not only didn’t win, they lost big. “Children don’t have a very good concept of money,” says Dr. Emil Slutpuppy, who created and instituted the program. “So losing it doesn’t mean much to them. When this program was first instituted, you had kids plunking down $200-$300 of taxpayer money per hand on the blackjack table. The paperwork got messy. But on the plus side, it took their minds off therapy.”
      Another problem with Gaming Therapy was that often the child would win and win big, and an addiction could be formed. “The concept of money becomes clearer to a child who is suddenly rolling in it,” says Dr. Slutpuppy. “A kid wins four or five grand at the craps table and all of a sudden he can buy our doctors and nurses, he’s getting preferential treatment – he becomes mad with power.” Not only that, but once Gaming Therapy was labeled as child cruelty, many children tried breaking out of hospitals to satiate their gambling addiction. “A lot of kids lost a lot of money,” says Dr. Slutpuppy. “But they’d have spent just as much on Pokemon or some such stupid thing.”

Modern Play Therapy
       Today’s modern hospitals offer many different versions of play therapy. Some offer toys and prizes as gifts to keep the children happy. “We had one kid last week that won a fully loaded Jeep Cherokee after he had the lower left quadrant of his brain removed,” says Dr. Emil Noodlescratcher, of the Boston Home For Wicked Sick Kids. “He just drives it up and down the hallways, blasting Kid Rock. He’s coming along fine.”
      Many argued with this method early on, but have since come around. New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli says: “I was very much against this method of rehabilitation, until I visited the hospital and tried it first hand. Let me tell you, if I’m a kid, I’m never leaving that hospital. I think the method works.”

The Coming of the Messiah
      I’d like to take a quick moment to tell you that the Messiah is coming, and if you don’t repent, you shall spend your eternity suffering the infernal machinations of Hell’s grim tyrant. May God have mercy on your souls.

Play Therapy in the Future
      Doctors now are predicting a version of play therapy that will involve inserting the kids into a virtual reality world, where rather than having to suffer through painful rehabilitation, they can engage in the fantasy of their choosing. Doctors are fond of this method, as they believe it will not only help with rehabilitation, but virtual reality casinos and burlesque houses can be created to satiate the addictions that were developed in other play therapy. However, this program has come under scrutiny in recent months as more and more doctors are discovered abusing the virtual reality equipment. A doctor at the New Mexico Hospital For Freakin’ Screwey Little Kids was recently charged with spending over seventeen hours using the equipment instead of tending to his patients. It turned out he was utilizing a virtual reality program that simulated treating patients, so he thought that’s what he was doing.
      Whichever direction play therapy takes in the future, you can bet that it will involve cool, refreshing Coca-Cola . Thank you and goodnight.