ABSTRACT
Therapeutic communities (TCs) developed before the psychopharmacological advances of the 1950s and long before the arrival of care in the wider community. Initially, they had represented a psychotherapeutic and sociotherapeutic response to the needs of the huge number of psychosocial casualties generated by the First World War. At that time, TCs were experimental treatments, innovated separately in different institutions. Working at Northfield Hospital, South Birmingham, Tom Main coined the term ‘therapeutic community’.1 For him, the TC was
... an attempt to use a hospital not as an organization run by doctors for their greater technical efficiency, but as a community with the immediate aim of full participation of all its members in its daily life and the eventual aim of the re-socialization of the neurotic individual for life in ordinary society.1
