Search results
1 – 10 of 11
This paper aims to demonstrate the confluence of thinking across several areas, in their critique of modernity, with potential solutions in the mental health field.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to demonstrate the confluence of thinking across several areas, in their critique of modernity, with potential solutions in the mental health field.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses case and organisational examples related to relevant theory and clinical practice to demonstrate relevant contradictions and paradoxes in “modernised” mental health care. This is based on the author's experience as a public sector psychiatrist specialising in “personality disorder” to lead a government programme of new service developments in the field.
Findings
Modern methods of management, focusing on measurement, prediction and control – in the service of efficiency and economy – are not sufficient to meet the needs of a population with high incidence of “personality disorder”. A major change of attitude is required, to an authentic biopsychosocial approach, including spiritual and other non‐verbal considerations.
Research limitations/implications
Hitherto, research has not combined these elements in a way that has made it easy to capture and analyse them. New methodologies and paradigms may be called for.
Practical implications
Mental health care should not be considered an entirely rational process that can be measured and manualised; considerations of how to better manage complexity and uncertainty are urgently needed.
Social implications
Destigmatisation and normalisation of mental distress and “illness” should occur.
Originality/value
The paper introduces two new terms to mental health discourse: “greencare” and “biopsychosocialism”.
Details
Keywords
Jan Lees, Rex Haigh, Simone Bruschetta, Anando Chatterji, Veronica Dominguez-Bailey, Sandra Kelly, Aldo Lombardo, Shama Parkhe, Joāo G. Pereira, Yousuf Rahimi and Barbara Rawlings
This paper aims to describe a method of training for practitioners in democratic Therapeutic Communities (TCs) which has been used in several settings across the world over the…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to describe a method of training for practitioners in democratic Therapeutic Communities (TCs) which has been used in several settings across the world over the past 25 years: the “Living-Learning Experience” (LLE) workshop. It goes on to consider the cross-cultural implications of the work.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing on the experience of running exactly the same programme in different countries and cultures, the paper examines the cross-cultural adaptability and describes necessary adaptations for local circumstances. It also contains original ethnographic research in UK and Italy; further study is planned for other countries.
Findings
The workshops are readily transferable to different cultures and are appreciated for their democratic and relational way of working.
Research limitations/implications
The ethnographic study examines the workshops in some depth, in UK and Italy, and could usefully be replicated in other countries. No quantitative, outcome or follow-up studies have yet been done, and this paper could contribute to the design of useful quantitative studies.
Practical implications
The paper demonstrates that the LLE is a useful experiential learning tool in widely different settings. It could be developed in different ways, such as for developing relational practice or establishing therapeutic environments in different settings.
Social implications
The workshops' acceptance in widely different cultures indicates that the open and non-didactic format addresses essential and fundamental qualities required for therapeutic engagement and human relatedness.
Originality/value
This is the first description of the principles of democratic TCs being applied across different international settings. Its value extends beyond the TC field, to the use of democratic and relational principles' applicability in therapeutic pedagogy and training.
Details
Keywords
Jan Lees, Fiona Lomas and Rex Haigh
The purpose of this paper is to describe the role of the expert by experience, and its benefits and challenges.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe the role of the expert by experience, and its benefits and challenges.
Design/methodology/approach
Review of the relevant literature and a case study has been performed.
Findings
The role of the expert by experience is fluid and complex. Staff need to understand the ambiguities of the role.
Practical implications
Experts by experience (XBXs) play an important role in TC practice. They need support and supervision. Staff need to learn about the complexities and fluidity of the role, and to be aware of its transitional position between service user and staff member.
Social implications
XBXs challenge the binary notion of staff and service user. The role calls for a different relational rather than procedural conceptualisation.
Originality/value
This is the first description of the lived experience of an expert by experience, working in a therapeutic community setting, with the analysis of the helpful and unhelpful aspects of the role.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the application of therapeutic community (TC) method in non-TC environments.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the application of therapeutic community (TC) method in non-TC environments.
Design/methodology/approach
Milieu treatment is defined and differentiated from TC “proper”. Literature is reviewed covering attempts to use TC methods in inpatient wards, across hospitals, and more recently in the criminal justice system and more widely through the enabling environments initiative.
Findings
It is unclear whether TC milieu treatments proved helpful in acute ward environments in their heyday in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, in particular those involving people suffering from acute psychosis, and the changing landscape of psychiatric provision may make further investigation difficult. The reasons for this, and for the difficulties reaching a firm conclusion, are outlined. In contrast, TC milieu interventions appear to be demonstrating usefulness more recently in less mixed populations without the implementation of full TC “proper”.
Research limitations/implications
Much of the research is old and the methodology poor, which limits the conclusions that can be drawn.
Practical implications
Recent innovations pick up in a more accessible way principles of therapeutic communities that can inform and improve care in a variety of contexts. They are sufficiently well defined to lend themselves to research, which should now be a priority.
Originality/value
After a gap in developments in the field, recent innovations are reintroducing elements of TC functioning to new contexts including criminal justice settings, inpatient wards, homeless shelters and city communities.
Details
Keywords
Simone Bruschetta and Raffaele Barone
The purpose of this paper is to present a model of democratic therapeutic community (DTC) for people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and psychotic disorder, namely the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a model of democratic therapeutic community (DTC) for people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia and psychotic disorder, namely the Group-Apartment (GA). The authors will describe it in more detail, discussing the ideas which lie behind it, considering the relative cost of treating people in larger residential DTCs and in GAs, outlining findings from the first data gathered on a GA and looking at the usefulness of this model in post-modern societies, with particular reference to Sicily.
Design/methodology/approach
In brief a GA is a flat, located in an urban apartment building, inhabited by a small group of people. In this paper the authors consider an apartment inhabited by a group of three or four patients with the presence of clinical social workers who work in shifts for several hours a day on all or most days of the week (Barone et al., 2009, 2010). GA is also inspired by the pioneering work of Pullen (1999, 2003), in the UK tradition of the apartment post TC for psychosis.
Findings
GAs in Italy have become one of the main methods of support housing in recovery-oriented treatment, because it allows the empowerment of the users and fights against the stigma of mental illness (Barone et al., 2014; Bruschetta et al., 2014). The main therapeutic activities provided in the GA depend on the type of recovery route being supported, on the level of autonomy being developed and on the level of participation in the democratic life of the local community.
Originality/value
GAs appear better, cheaper and a more appropriate treatment for mental problems in the current financial and social climate than larger institutions. Where they have been tried out, they have been found to be effective, by users and by stakeholders. They exemplify the advantages of the DTC for encouraging recovery, but cost less to run. In accordance with DTC principles, the social democratic process is used not only to evaluate the clinical effectiveness of GAs, but also to build a network to support the development of innovative mental health services and new enabling environments (Haigh et al., 2012).
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to introduce prolonged therapeutic community action research and compare research on new social movements in both Latin America and throughout the…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to introduce prolonged therapeutic community action research and compare research on new social movements in both Latin America and throughout the Australasia Southeast Asia Oceania Region where the later region’s new social movements emerged in large part from Therapeutic Community Outreach.
Design/methodology/approach
The qualitative method used combined prolonged depth interviews, action research, gathering warm data (N Bateson) and archival research and triangulated the findings. In writing this paper, a connoisseur derived narrative method is used consistent the socio-cultural contexts involved.
Findings
The characteristics and significant implications and values of these new social movements are outlined. These new social movements are not taking familiar forms with political power as an identifier – rather, a core feature is their transformatory potential in re-forming socio-cultural and socio-psychic patterns of everyday social relating penetrating the micro-structures of society. New forms of social movement are lively in unexpected public places within everyday socio-cultural life.
Research limitations/implications
The research implications extend to providing processes used in pioneering TCs in Australia in the 1960s.
Practical implications
Co-action outlined may be a resource for therapeutic communities under threat in parts of the world.
Social implications
The transformatory potential within new social movements is not political, but socio-cultural and any focus on power relations would miss this shift.
Originality/value
The action research overviewed in this paper is perhaps a unique example of prolonged engagement in integrated action research on TC processes over more than 60 years.
Details
Keywords
Karine Greenacre and Rebecca Paez
The purpose of this paper is to apply current understanding of service user involvement (SUI) to forensic practice with reference to the benefits and drawbacks. Specifically, it…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to apply current understanding of service user involvement (SUI) to forensic practice with reference to the benefits and drawbacks. Specifically, it discusses models of SUI and their application to a psychologically informed planned environment (PIPE) located in a Category C male prison.
Design/methodology/approach
Drawing upon residents’ experiences, the evaluation reflects on the contribution of cultural, environmental and political factors to the success or failure of SUI within the PIPE service.
Findings
The evaluation will review current systems and explore ways of improving and strengthening strategies by referring to the “whole systems approach” to SUI (Wright, 2006).
Originality/value
The evaluation makes recommendations for local and national SUI within PIPE services.
Details