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Paper short abstract:

As a treatment modality, the residential therapeutic community is predicated on learning about oneself and others. Turning patients’ attention both outward and inward, toward social interaction and their role in/responses to it, recovery rests in cultivating a form of psychological ethnography.

Paper long abstract:

As a modality of treatment, the residential therapeutic community is predicated on two basic assumptions: first, that a collective, rather than dyadic, context is most conducive to recovery from mental illness; and second, that such recovery requires active, guided learning about oneself and others. This learning is directed at social, rather than individual, dynamics: within the community, both one-to-one therapy and group discussions involve learning about one’s condition as it pertains to everyday behaviour and thought in relations with others. In turn, living within the residential community provides a ready laboratory for trying out new interactional strategies, often using individually tailored ‘behavioural experiments’ set as part of the participant’s weekly therapeutic ‘homework’ and undertaken with the support of other residents. In the national NHS Anxiety Disorders Residential Unit, located in London, the therapeutic community approach is taken a step further by explicitly encouraging curiosity about oneself and others, guiding participants in an attunement to the community’s social world to foster reflexivity, empathy, and compassion—an attunement that is surprisingly resonant with ethnographic engagement. That is, by turning patients’ attention both inward and outward, advocating a gentle curiosity about others and awareness of one’s own role in and responses to the immediate social environment, the therapeutic community model requires the learning afforded by an implicit psychological ethnography as key to recovery.