Current therapeutic community work with children and young people

Citation

Diamond, J. (2016), "Current therapeutic community work with children and young people", Therapeutic Communities: The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, Vol. 37 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/TC-01-2016-0005

Current therapeutic community work with children and young people

Article Type: Editorial From: Therapeutic Communities: The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, Volume 37, Issue 1.

John Diamond is a CEO at Mulberry Bush Organisation, Oxford, UK.

Welcome to this Special Edition of “current TC work with children and young people”. The edition contains papers on TC work from across Europe; Hungary, Italy and the UK. These papers are ultimately about creating nurturing and healing ways of living together.

In a time when we are experiencing the largest migration of displaced peoples across Europe since Second World War, along with fast moving societal anxieties about the need to strengthen formerly “fluid” concepts of border, boundary and identity, never has there been a greater need to promote TC thinking and principles, as the foundation to create productive and cohesive communities.

In his paper “Social plastic at work: structure for dialogues on a TC” Zsolt Zalka, Director of Thalassa Hass Therapeutic Community, in Budapest Hungary, captures something of their own developmental struggle to create an appropriate holding structure in which genuine dialogue can take place. This leads to analysis of the quintessential elements of their current therapeutic culture.

“From our perspective, in the treatment of severe self-disorders, the matrix of the values, norms, and rules operating in the community’s relational culture has a specific effect in the process of healing as a consciously constructed collective agent”.

Through careful articulation of these values, norms and rules, Zalka explores the role of the Therapeutic “Community as Mirror” – in which the transformational properties of the relational, and empathic system may be internalised by severely emotionally troubled clients.

Following this in their paper “The Useless Therapist”, Cropper and Godsal engage with an exploration of a more personalised therapeutic struggle, and another perspective on the concept of mirroring: in their work as music and drama therapists they are often “made to feel useless” as they work with annihilatory and neutralising projections from primary aged children at the Mulberry Bush School.

They remind us of the central and critical role of countertransference in understanding and ultimately tolerating the feelings of rejection which first have to be “seen to be survived” and then worked through, if the child is to evolve emotionally.

The theme of developing a relational culture is also picked up in the paper “the primary school as a TC”. Winship and Mac Donald initially explore how successive government policies have attempted to deliver “early intervention” mental health services within educational settings. Many schools now employ a psychotherapist or counsellor who are well placed to hold in mind the range of relationships and dynamics across the school community, including working and communicating with the child’s family.

They argue that the concept of the school is moving towards a more holistic model, with schools often extending their role beyond education; breakfast and after-school clubs are examples of this evolution. Such extended school services are often a life-line, providing consistent care and an extended “holding environment” to children, especially in the more deprived areas of the UK.

The authors argue it is time to consciously position the concept of school as an “adapted TC”, with the role of school counsellor or psychotherapist as a facilitator who might help to foster a whole school approach in order to sustain a broader therapeutic milieu and curriculum.

Finally Barbara Rawlings paper: “Learning from Action” is a description and evaluation of an experiential learning programme.

In this paper Rawlings (who joined the conference as a participant observer), describes and evaluates the 2014 three-day “Learning from Action” working conference run by the Il Nodo Group in Italy. The international conference runs annually, and offers participants an in-depth exploration of how non-verbal communication influences the take up of individual and group roles within a temporary TC. It brings together two psychotherapeutic approaches: Groups Relations and Therapeutic Community.

The paper explores what these approaches consist of, how they are brought together, and whether in the researchers view the workshop is effective as a training programme.