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The purpose of this paper is to compare and evaluate three experiential training workshops, each set up as three-day transient therapeutic communities, and established to train therapeutic community staff.

The author carried out participant observation of all courses and analysed these using thematic analysis. The description is provided in Part 1 of the paper. The evaluation, in Part 2 was based on written feedback from participants and from assessment against relevant audit criteria.

All three workshops achieved their aims of providing participants with an authentic TC resident’s experience. Additionally, each offered personal understandings of how participants felt and why they felt that way in the community setting.

This was largely a piece of qualitative research, carried out in the field, to achieve depth of description and understanding rather than statistical outcomes. Some numerical scores were derived from feedback forms. Further analysis of feedback from future workshops will strengthen findings by increasing the numbers of respondents.

The workshops should continue largely as they are, although there may be some small changes to the designs. They achieve the aim of advancing the understanding of TC staff members.

The paper is based on three earlier unpublished reports and is new published research of interest to trainers in the fields of mental health and experiential learning.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the learning from action (LfA) workshop held in Italy in October 2014 and to evaluate how well the workshop achieved its aims.

The researcher joined the workshop as a member, and data were collected through participant observation. Evaluation was carried out using relevant audit standards and a follow-up questionnaire.

The evaluation found that an authentic transient therapeutic community was created, which provided an effective learning experience for participants.

The description is a single study based on the findings of a single researcher, as is usual with ethnographic work of this kind. Only a few participants completed the questionnaire.

This is the first detailed research description of the LfA programme for training mental health practitioners who work in therapeutic communities. It provides a description of events, comments on how some of these impacted on the researcher-participant and an evaluation of the workshop.

Training in therapeutic community and related approaches has not been widely available, and there is debate about the form this should take. This has had a negative impact on the field. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

The authors consider the history of training in democratic therapeutic community methods in the UK in particular, and trace some of the reasons for its lack of development.

With the expansion of TC methodology into new areas, such as therapeutic and enabling environments, the ability to provide training in DTC approaches and techniques is increasingly important. The developing evidence base, and the increasing detail in which the method has been described, make dedicated TC training increasingly important.

Training in therapeutic community methods, and enabling and therapeutic environment approaches, provides a grounding in technique and theory that would otherwise be impossible to acquire for most workers, and can lead to a general increase in the level of competence and confidence in the way these environments operate.

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.

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.

The workshops are readily transferable to different cultures and are appreciated for their democratic and relational way of working.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to describe transient therapeutic communities (TCs) and their value for training.

This is a descriptive account which includes the findings of two field study evaluations, and direct participant feedback. It is an exploration of the application of TC and group analytic theory to transient TCs.

The transient TC format is an excellent training format for creating a powerful and effective environment for learning and personal development in the very short time frame of three days.

These courses are a very efficient and effective way of promoting reflective practice, enabling environments, and emotionally safe working practices. The trainings are useful for a wide range of people from mental health professions, those working in human resources, and those in senior positions in industrial, commercial and public sector fields.

This paper will raise awareness that target-driven training is insufficient to improve quality of services beyond a certain point. A relational focus of training is needed to deal with issues of complexity which cannot be resolved by simple managerial methods. This experiential training can help to meet the need for inculcating compassion, kindness, and empathy in its participants.

Although other psychotherapy and group relations courses exist, and are used beyond the mental health field, the focus on generating an experience of belonging, emotional safety and democratic empowerment in the relational field of the course itself – by use of TC methodology – is novel, and could be of considerable value more widely.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the training value of a residential “enabling environments” (LLEE) workshop in relation to the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ (RCPsych) ten specified standards, as rated by workshop participants.

A 34 question yes/no/na questionnaire was drawn up, derived from the ten value-based standards and criteria which need to be met for the enabling environment (EE) award by the RCPsych’s Centre for Quality Improvement (Table AI). It was administered after six residential workshops, in Italy and UK, to 99 participants. Results were analysed for each of the six workshops, and for each of the ten standards, to show the degree to which participants recognised whether the standards were met.

High rates of positive responses were recorded with little variation across the six workshops sampled. Some standards and criteria showed higher levels of positive responses, and some showed slightly higher scores for “not applicable”.

Experiential Living-Learning Experience (LLE) workshops provide a valid training experience for those developing or working in EEs.

Value-based standards can only be fully understood by direct experience of them, as verbal or written explanations fail to convey the psychological impact of the experience.

The questionnaire and its translation is the original work of AL. RH is the founder of LLE training workshops and the EE award.

During the latter part of the twentieth century, mental hospitals, originally built to provide asylum from the excesses of “community care” in the 1800s, began to be perceived as themselves damaging. Therapeutic communities within traditional hospitals offered a hopeful alternative. This paper aims to provide a succinct historical critique of the developments.

Narrative and historical review.

Attempts at reform met with varying degrees of success. Some communities closed down in the wake of public scandals while others were eminently successful. Organisational change presented social and psychological threats which were difficult to overcome. Leadership was an important factor in determining the outcome.

This paper gives an insight into the social‐psychiatric approaches and organisational theories of the time. It is published in the belief that many of the themes remain relevant today.

The learning from action (LfA) workshop was born more than 20 years ago and held in various places in Italy. This study aims to provide a learning experience for therapeutic communities (TCs) workers. During these years, the LfA work has developed by creating a dialogue between the experiential conferences and the group relations conferences (GRC) run by the Tavistock Institute. In this paper, the author explores the dialogue between (the leadership-oriented) GRC and (democratic) TC culture.

The authors intend to show how this dialogue has developed in LfA, describing tasks, purposes and critical aspects of LfA specific events: decision-making plenary, decision-making, TCs, action, dialog between cultures, GRC, learning methodology, decision-making group, activity group, morning and evening community meetings.

The authors confirmed the idea that acting and working together is a way of learning and communicating with each other. The role activities and works the authors do together to provide for the community in LfA have a more authentic quality of life than the purely verbal reflective work of a GRC.

The paper describes how LfA has developed and consolidated over the years, constituting an original learning model inspired by the typical activities of the culture of democratic TCs and the learning methodology of GRCs.