I remember a talk in the last year or so, when - despite the erratic translation - Raffaele Barone and I came to a cosmic agreement about what is needed. And here it is in diagram form:
So off four of us went - once we had got our passports in the right place at the right time - to do some detailed interviews with the key people behind the Sicilian magic. And what did we find?
...that it is just as hard there as it is here, and to make a thing like that work, it needs a great deal of energy, enthusiasm, willingness to work way beyond the call of duty for a pittance, and taking risks with your capital all the while. A bigger scale maybe, but not unlike what we're doing in GBL after all.
Here's Trevor's notes on it:
The first reaction when I announced at home that I was going
to do some work in Sicily was that I was very lucky, but it wasn’t expressed in
quite such polite terms. No amount of explanation and protestation that this is
not a holiday entirely changes the perception, but of course the reality was
somewhat different, with the usual early start, punishing travel conditions and
herding around at airports with many other sleep deprived travellers. The programme
for the three days of training were also busy enough and structured enough to
preclude much leisure time. However, the
company was very good and the journey through from Catania relaxing and the
venue when we reached it, a social farm called Terra Nostra, was a haven of
seclusion, with beautiful plants and trees, delightful animals and perfect
weather.
 |
| The development group in their den |
From past experience, I have learned to expect the
unexpected on working trips to Italy, but I hoped to get an Italian perspective
on the therapeutic community and an insight into the somewhat different approach
to, and perceptions of, autonomy and recovery for members of this kind of
mental health facility. I am also interested in how the relationship between
professionals and members is perceived and how much real democracy is possible,
partly because some of my colleagues in Italy are suspicious of any discussion
of “therapy” in the context of social integration, because of the connotations
of the sort of unequal relationships and medicalisation which is prevalent in
the psychiatric establishment.
This visit also provided an opportunity to compare how this
kind of setting and the way it is set up might affect the experience of
members, particularly in relation to the principles of green care. Differences
in opportunities for setting up and funding green care facilities were
obviously of great interest.
In terms of my own subjective experience, I did expect,
because it is a consistent pattern or progression, to have initial doubts about
my own role and a perceived need to have my own space. This can easily lead to
projections onto others which take a while to unravel and could have been
amplified by our rather ambiguous role as observers. However, such feelings
were soon dissipated by the openness and warmth of the other participants and
the transition to a more secure feeling and sense of belonging wasn’t long in
coming.
It was remarked that this was a group of professionals, reasonable
people in similar jobs, and it was therefore unsurprising that communal living
of short duration caused few stresses or disputes. However, I was surprised by
just how open and good humoured the participants were as a group. This must
have made the ambiguities of the democratic approach, for example within work
tasks, easier to resolve, although there were discussions about the difficulties
inherent in an arrangement where nobody was responsible for decision making, or
rather, everyone was. There was a tongue in cheek comment that this was
anarchic rather than democratic therapy.
It was interesting to see how the community meeting was
arranged. Although it was quite structured on paper, with a business-like
agenda, the leaders merely stipulated that it should start and end on time and
that the chairperson should be whoever ended up sitting in the seat on which
the agenda had been placed. Little guidance was given before or during the
meeting as to the approach of the chairperson, which resulted in meetings that
seemed more like a large group than a community meeting.
One of the most interesting aspects of the trip was the
chance to see the set up at Terra Nostra. The challenges faced by anyone
wanting to set up a democratic Therapeutic community within a rather inflexible
psychiatric system with chronic funding problems are very familiar. Although
there are now small grants available from the EU for starting social farms, the
aim is to promote traditional farming, and they aren’t targeted at mental
health projects. This may have some advantages, but in any case, this
particular project was developed by the investment of the personal funds of a
dedicated and resourceful professional who realised that seeking funding from
the psychiatric and political establishment was just too problematic and
involved unacceptable compromises. However
we think the world ideally should be, his success with Terra Nostra is
something from which we should derive real inspiration.
