Photograph by Jonathan Pollack
New situations can cause major distress for children with autism—and going from home to a hospital can be particularly nerve-racking. So to help calm children with developmental disabilities and teach them how to respond to new situations, Mercy Children’s Hospital opened the Snoezelen Multi-Sensory Room last November.
The therapeutic room, located in the Mercy Behavioral Health building, can stimulate pediatric psychiatric patients with soothing sounds, a rainbow of lights, interactive screens and bubble tubes, massage chairs and mats, aromatherapy, and more.
“We are starting to see more and more kids with intellectual and developmental disabilities. They are less able to interact, less able to be maintained in a group of people,” says Dr. Duru Sakhrani, medical director of child and adolescent inpatient psychiatry at Mercy Children’s Hospital. “What used to happen was that they would have one-on-ones and hardly ever do anything that was behaviorally therapeutic or calming. Anecdotally, using the Snoezelen room, we see a significant reduction in the patients’ anxiety, agitation, and aggression.”
Funded by Variety the Children’s Charity of St. Louis, the space is the area’s first of its kind (the next closest is in Memphis, Tenn.). Children ages 5 to 18 who are admitted to Mercy’s inpatient psychiatric services receive a physician’s order to visit the room for a range of reasons and frequencies, whether for 5 to 15 minutes several times a day, as part of a 45-minute group session, or as a reward for reaching a goal.
Stimuli in the room can be individualized for each patient. “We send the children into the room with dedicated staff that can alter the modalities to calm them,” says Sakhrani. “The younger children like the colors and the shapes, and some others are more into the lights or the bubbles.”
Looking forward, Sakhrani hopes to do a pilot study of a few cases to develop protocols and evaluate patients’ mood, anxiety levels, and distress before and after being in the room for certain lengths of time.
“The results from studies in sensory-integration therapies is kind of mixed,” Sakhrani says. “Our goal is to formalize it as part of a study and see whether or not we’re able to quantify any changes that we see as part of a reasonable, objective outcome.”
The staff hopes to introduce the room to other inpatient and outpatient pediatric patients as well, Sakhrani adds, to help them learn to reduce stress from modern technological stimuli.
