Editorial

I am honoured to present this special edition of the International Journal of Therapeutic Communities on the theme of the Elly Jansen Award: honoured and delighted. I have had the good fortune to be involved in the Elly Jansen Award from the beginning – all of three years ago! – and to have had the pleasure of reading the entries and meeting many of the authors. It’s been an exciting and stimulating process.This special edition brings together the winners of the Award for original article, and the winners of the Award for original research proposal, and some of the runner-up and commended articles from both the 2023 and 2024 entries.They represent a diverse array of perspectives and practices, all within the therapeutic community movement. I think one of the most heartening things that I have taken from being involved in this process has been not just the quality of the entrants’ submissions but the very different work they describe. Therapeutic communities have a long history and a strong set of values hewn from that history, and there are now quality assurance frameworks like that of the Community of Communities, and “textbooks” like Pearce and Haigh’s (2017) “The Theory and Practice of Democratic Therapeutic Community Treatment”, yet they continue to develop and change and adapt to meet the needs of their times and their communities. In the end, as Craig Fees put it, therapeutic communities are “a group of people coming together to resolve a shared problem” (personal communication). The “shared problem” ranges from working through mental and emotional distress to containing feelings of existential threat to learning how to live together, do the shopping, keep the place clean, and make something to eat. All are crucial to life.And that is why therapeutic communities, whatever form they take, whatever the different ways they conceive of and then realise themselves, however they self-actualise, are so important, and why the collection of writings in this Journal are so heartening. The learning from experience, the sharing of experience so that all in a group may learn, the development of new ways of learning and sharing experience, are all represented here. These are crucial processes to the resolution of all and any of the problems facing humanity at the moment, from the global scale to the local to the immediate social circle of colleagues, family and friends.The actual term therapeutic community may be out of fashion; certainly it often feels that way in the world of mental health in the UK. But the fundamental concept of the therapeutic community – a group of people coming together to resolve a shared problem – remains fundamental to the therapeutic endeavour, whatever we call it: day communities, micro-communities, nano-communities, modified therapeutic communities, enabling environments, psychologically informed environments, self-help groups, open dialogue, relational practice etc. And the fundamental principles of permissiveness, communality, reality confrontation and democracy underpin all the best examples of work with people in distress, again regardless of what the actual working practice is called.Therapeutic communities are perhaps an idea, an ideal, and a broad set of practices, not a copyrighted manualised brand-name with some snazzy logo that more or less resembles a phallus; they are not the Amazon of mental healthcare! They represent instead a practice based in humanity and social justice, in the human endeavour to support those in distress and to use human resources like experience, empathy, compassion, attachment, understanding and mutual respect in the alleviation of suffering.The writings presented here, from the inaugural two rounds of the Elly Jansen Award, illustrate just a tiny sample of the breadth of thought, experience and practice that show just how alive the therapeutic community still is.Peter Cockersell, November 2024