Abstract

A major question facing therapists today is how to treat psychosis effectively while maintaining patients' dignity, self-respect and their psychological and social functioning. This book provides important and engaging accounts of the special personal and interpersonal care offered by the Arbours Crisis Centre and kindred facilities.
`This is the seventh volume in the therapeutic communities series and a highly informative and reassuring read for anyone interested in psychodynamic applications, or working with individuals with a mental illness.'
Therapeutic Communities Journal
`Having no first hand experience of working with mental illness from a psychodynamic perspective, I hoped that this book would provide me with an insight in to the therapeutics of mental illness within a community. The book certainly accomplished this and more. In keeping with the `community spirit' I also feel this book would be of interest to those already in the field, both nationally and internationally, as a means of sharing other therapy experiences.'
Therapeutic Communities Journal
`The book is basically an account of the Arbours Crisis Centre in London in the words of therapists who have lived and worked there. Part of the therapeutic community movement and the antipsychiatry tradition of RD Laing, the centre has long provided an alternative approach to mental health care. Of course the book goes beyond simply documenting the development of the centre to offer a an implicit critique of mainstream psychiatric treatment and an argument `for a humane, useful and cost-effective alternative to traditional, physical, psychiatric treatments'.'
Mental Health Today