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The paper is based on three earlier unpublished reports and is new published research of interest to trainers in the fields of mental health and experiential learning.

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 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.

Therapy is reflexive but not synonymous with therapists' accounting practices. It is displayed and engenders dominance but it is not an institutional rhetoric or a mechanism of social control. Six properties of therapeutic work are enumerated — reflexiveness, interpretativeness, interventionalism, domination, habituation tendencies and selectivity. All apart from reflexiveness are subject to differences of form and extension in different therapeutic communities. These variations in therapeutic work and communities can be empirically mapped. Such a conception of therapeutic work may have applications to therapeutic work outside the therapeutic communities and any other institutional setting. Two data extracts empirically ground the discussion.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Early in 1987, Pierian Press published the first volume of an annual publication, Book of Days. Book of Days is an encyclopedic collection of 435 resource guides—pathfinders—most of which were compiled by subject authorities and other professionals with strong research skills. The guides include an introductory text that provides major details concerning the subject. This is followed by citations of: reference works; books for adults, young adults, and children; feature films, other audiovisual resources, and recordings; project and discussion topics; cross‐reference dates related to the subject; and other supporting information.