Indira Kjellstrand and Russ Vince
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the potential of photo-elicitation as a data generating method. Photo-elicitation is rarely used for data generation, despite the…
Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the potential of photo-elicitation as a data generating method. Photo-elicitation is rarely used for data generation, despite the considerable promise of this method. Our empirical investigation focused on people's emotions and experiences of dual systems in Kazakhstan, a country currently undergoing change from the old Soviet system to a new market economy. In addition to semistructured interviews, we use photographs in order to enhance emotional connection and recall. We use the imagery as a device to generate data, and more specifically, data on individual and social perspectives that are integral to particular experiences. We argue that photo-elicitation can bring out peoples' lived experiences of the social context being investigated. We explain why and how to use the method in practice.
Details
Keywords
This paper aims to bring back into view some of the original ideas from which the Therapeutic Community (TC) developed today. If we forget the origins of therapeutic communities…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to bring back into view some of the original ideas from which the Therapeutic Community (TC) developed today. If we forget the origins of therapeutic communities way back in the past, we cannot be in the best position to make decisions for the present. The underlying principles of the TC are a combination of social science ideas, psychotherapeutic practices and a political urgency to do something for disadvantaged people. There is a need to try to keep all branches of the past roots in play together.
Design/methodology/approach
Learning from the past.
Findings
The past has a relevance that must not be forgotten in present reflection.
Originality/value
This is a reflective exercise at the heart of the therapeutic community practice.
Details
Keywords
R.D. Hinshelwood and Craig Fees
The purpose of this paper is to present a previously unpublished letter from children’s therapeutic community pioneer David Wills to his younger colleague in the field, Robert…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to present a previously unpublished letter from children’s therapeutic community pioneer David Wills to his younger colleague in the field, Robert Laslett, which attempts to define and summarise a lifetime’s understanding of the essence of a therapeutic environment. This raises concepts and issues of relevance to current theory and practice in therapeutic environments.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors contextualise the 1977 letter from David Wills before presenting it verbatim, with clarifying annotations relating to people and events. They then analyse and discuss the fundamental arguments presented in the letter, with relevance to current thinking and practice.
Findings
The approach presented by David Wills to his younger colleague is deeply challenging to current concepts and understandings of therapeutic environments and the role in the therapeutic task of subjectivity and “attitude of mind”. The view is taken that this presents “a great question for wide debate, right now”.
Research limitations/implications
Very little historical/analytical research has taken place into the experiences, thinking and practice of those who have built the diverse fields of therapeutic communities and environments, not least because history disturbs and challenges the present. This paper opens a small window on the vast resources which are available, and indicates something of the rich potential for debate and practical challenge Experts by Experience pose to living and, hopefully, learning practitioners to day.
Practical implications
Questions are raised: the debate they engender should eventuate into clearer, better grounded, more radical, and more effective practice.
Social implications
This letter challenges assumptions about the role and nature of the “therapeutic attitude” and the place of subjectivity, with profound implications for the therapeutic enterprise itself, and the organisation of therapeutic environments, as well as policy, assessment and regulation regimes.
Originality/value
The use of previously unpublished archive material opens living questions to examination from a different perspective, widening the debate to include voices of expertise and experience which are generally, consciously or unconsciously, excluded from it. Presenting the letter in its whole, and not excerpted as supporting evidence, allows the voice of expertise by experience to contribute directly to discussion and debate; unbalancing and enriching it.
Details
Keywords
Psychiatry in its traditional form, often relegates the patient to a passive recipient, and removes his/her agency. The paper aims to examine the reasons for this and the value of…
Abstract
Purpose
Psychiatry in its traditional form, often relegates the patient to a passive recipient, and removes his/her agency. The paper aims to examine the reasons for this and the value of it from a largely theoretical perspective.
Design/methodology/approach
The literature is examined on the responsibilities removed from patients by prescribing treatment, both medication, and psychotherapy.
Findings
The literature describes how humans in their collectives, groups or communities, generate commonly held attitudes, which may coerce patients into certain roles, and to give up their responsibilities and their agencies. It is postulated that this is possible in a therapeutic community where the unconscious dynamics could resemble those of psychiatric units.
Practical implications
The significance of the findings is that some degree of vigilance has to be maintained over what sets of attitudes develop in a community and especially the role that patients are assigned.
Originality/value
The findings suggest that the therapeutic community method should not be idealised but can go wrong, or can harbour coercive un‐therapeutic influences. There needs to be some continuing awareness of the development of such dynamics.
Details
Keywords
Abstract
Details
Keywords
This paper aims to explore the dynamics of communities which decline and die.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the dynamics of communities which decline and die.
Design/methodology/approach
The example of the Marlborough Day Hospital in the 1970s is used and analysed as a form of fieldwork.
Findings
It was found that the demise of the community can be traced to ambiguities in the attitudes to authority on which the development of the community was based in the first place.
Practical implications
The demise of a therapeutic community is a common occurrence, and often attributed to the unfriendly attentions of some outside agency. But the paper explores the possibility that certain internal dynamics within the community need examination as well as the relations to the outside world, and the hosting organisation.
Originality/value
The findings add to the importance of understanding the dynamics of therapeutic communities, not just for their therapeutic benefit, but for the survival of the community itself.
Details
Keywords
Jan Lees, Rex Haigh and Sarah Tucker
The purpose of this paper is to highlight theoretical and clinical similarities between therapeutic communities (TCs) and group analysis (GA).
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to highlight theoretical and clinical similarities between therapeutic communities (TCs) and group analysis (GA).
Design/methodology/approach
Literature review shows comparison of TC and group-analytic concepts with illustrative case material.
Findings
Findings reveal many similarities between TCs and GA, but also significant divergences, particularly in practice.
Practical implications
This paper provides theoretical basis for TC practice, and highlights the need for greater theorising of TC practice.
Social implications
This paper highlights the importance of group-based treatment approaches in mental health.
Originality/value
This is the first paper to review the relevant literature and compare theory and practice in TCs and GA, highlighting their common roots in the Northfields Experiments in the Second World War.
Details
Keywords
This paper aims to adapt the medical phenomenon of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) to an organisational context. Specifically, MSBP serves as a novel metaphor to describe the…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to adapt the medical phenomenon of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) to an organisational context. Specifically, MSBP serves as a novel metaphor to describe the tendency for the organisation and the leader to perpetuate cycles of illness and therapy.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual metaphor is proposed based on the clinical description of MSBP. A perpetual feedback model emphasises a constant cycle of illness and therapy among leaders and organisations, often fabricated by a narcissist through destructive management.
Findings
The metaphor presented suggests that the role of deception is important for understanding why therapeutic approaches are often unnecessary, highly disruptive and administered by a destructive leader who possesses the power to alienate or dismiss non-corroborative organisational members. The implications of continuously passing illness between the leader and the organisation are a state of organisational disequilibrium and the manufacture of depersonalised, ill members.
Originality/value
This conceptual paper adds to the growing body of literature on behavioural strategy and contributes to the fields of organisational psychology, organisational analysis, management and employee relations.
Details
Keywords
The purpose of this paper is to construct a genealogy of therapeutic communities (TCs), with the espoused commitment to flattened hierarchies and democratic ideologies, the paper…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to construct a genealogy of therapeutic communities (TCs), with the espoused commitment to flattened hierarchies and democratic ideologies, the paper considers the lineage of the Frankfurt School of Social Research and its influence in setting a frame for TC ideology, with a particular focus on Herbert Marcuse and Eric Fromm. This genealogy provides further context to the contribution of two other key Frankfurters, Karl Mannheim and Michael Foulkes, who progressed therapeutic democracy in the UK and shaped the early days of the TC as a group-based treatment paradigm.
Design/methodology/approach
Discourse analysis and collective biography based on biographical details, texts and witness accounts.
Findings
The works of Marcuse and Fromm provide a hybrid psychosocial post-Freudian schemas that beckoned philosophic reconciliation between the state and the personal psyche culminating in new left psychoanalytic academic sectors. Eric Fromm's contribution is situated squarely in the clinical sphere in the USA dating from the 1930s after he fled from Germany and settled in the USA where he became a well-known lecturer at Chestnut Lodge during a time when it was developing its approach under the rubric of “milieu therapy”. Marcuse's influence on psychiatry is tracked through the development of ideas and writings emerging from his reading of Freud, finally intersecting with the emergence of TCs and anti-psychiatry when he delivered the keynote address at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference in London in 1967. Held at the height of the first generation of TCs, Joe Berke, R.D. Laing and colleagues considered Marcuse as someone to headline the Dialectics Conference because; “Marcuse was the Grandpapa of Flower Power” (Joe Berke said).
Originality/value
A rapprochement between milieu therapy in the USA, influenced by Fromm and Marcuse and the European tradition of TCs, influenced by Mannheim and Foulkes is demonstrated. The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research can be seen as an ideological corner that transcends Atlantic divides, and provides a sturdy and lasting intellectual cornerstone for the history of ideas in the field of social psychiatry.