TCs for Canada day one: Just what is a TC anyway?

TCs for Canada (day 1): Just what is a TC anyway?

Democratic Therapeutic Communities, Enabling Environments and Relational Practice in British Columbia

It might seem that the side of Vancouver thet we see in other countirs - particularly the desperation of Lowewr East Side and Hastings Streeet (such as Simon Reeve's BBC travelogue) - is a world away from the boundaried and collective way we work in Democratic TCs. But maybe it isn't. But more of that in day 2...

Well, just from talking to the folk about wht they are up to, there’s a lot of DTC there already – which isn’t what I was expecting. As I walked into several of the eleven pilot ‘demonstration sites’ run by various partners in the development collaborative, anybody with a nose for these things could smell it, feel it and sense it in the first moments of being there. Partly the décor, partly the way you were welcomed, partly the signs on the walls – but also the buzz, the hum, or the tranquillity. And equally impressive is that the whole collective realises that it itself is already a kind of adapted democratic TC. You could even call it an embryonic Canadian Community of Communities – CCC, maybe.

At a very warm, welcoming and friendly dinner on the first night I met and chatted to most of the main characters in the whole set-up. And what characters they are – several articulate, powerful and very well-connected women outnumber the similarly impressive men, from a perplexing variety of different types of organisation, but all of whom share an absolute determination to change the nature of services for those who have fallen out of mainstream society – through homelessness, addictions, poor mental health, criminality-to-survive, and trauma. The services were most prominently for addictions – although all the other factors were major problems for may of the people needing to make a change in their lives: it is what we call ‘complex needs’ back in the UK. Over that dinner, we came up with a new word for the effort to de-silo it, which also brings in the inescapable fact (rarely well-recognised by the authorities) that the different strands of difficulty are never helpfully separated or untangled. They are all part of the same overall disaggio diffuso – and we called it ENTANGLEMENT. The parallel with the inexplicable nature of quantum mechanics tickled some of us!

Sunset over Granville Island: Bill McGowan, Rob Turnbull, Karla Delgado, Dale Houghton,
Isaac Hernandez, Tracey Harvey and (out of shot - Brenda Plant and Sherry Mumford)

This is obviously a wicked problem, particularly in Vancouver, judging by its worldwide coverage (for example BBC's 'The Americas with Simon Reeve', 6 October 2019). The wicked problem - including towns and cities further afield in British Columbia - has several determined, energetic and well-connected individuals and organisations who have been thinking about it for several years. Their ideal model includes ideas from several celebrated international examples which they have been researching:

• Delancey Street, San Fransisco - and Canadian successors like John Volken Academy in nearby Surrey. It is interesting that Delancey St graduates are behind 'The Other Side Village' (and its  Academy) in Salt Lake City. See future posts...
• San Patrignano, Emilio Romagna, Italy (Adriatic Coast) - whose Canadian siblings include Baldy Hughes TC & Farm.
• Various others which they have visited: Vitanova in Ontario; Portage Foundation based in Quebec; Woodwyn Farms (before being closed by the BC government); Guthrie House (the prison concept-type TC on Vancouver Island)
• The Portuguese decriminalisation model, as an ambitious whole-system way of moving towards recovery TCs (model or type unclear)
• ...and hopefully a few ideas from DTCs, Enabling Environments and Relational Practice after the UK visit and the LLEs, and whatever may follow!

‘Therapeutic Communities’ is a problematic term in many ways – the impossibility and undesirability of exactly defining it; the loose use of it – particularly in Italy; the baggage of addiction TCs being hostile and authoritarian; the baggage of democratic TCs being chaotic and unpredictable; lack of any widespread understanding of the differences; the reality that nearly all TCs could now be called 'Adapted TCs'; the difficulty in establishing an evidence base acceptable to biomedically-based authorities; the perception that they are a thing of the past …and probably many other factors.

All that notwithstanding, some do believe that they have a future – my late and much-missed colleague Steve Pearce, with whom I co-authored the only recent book on DTCs ‘Democratic Therapeutic Communities’, and the energetic and visionary people of Vancouver and BC who have so far run three book clubs to study the text of the book in some detail. Steve, the readers and I came together just before covid for a couple of zoom seminars – which led to other things.

One is the planning of two ‘Living-Learning Experiences’ experiential training workshops with six of us who are members of the ‘International Network of Living-Learning Experiences’ (INLLE) going to Vancouver in September 2023, another is a kind invitation for me to visit and meet as many of them as possible, which has happened in the last few days, and the third is for three of the collaborative's leaders to join a UK research tour later this month. Needless to say, with such a well-organised and passionately committed group of people, they have plenty of other ideas about what needs to happen after these demonstration sites have proved their worth.

I will write a separate entry to describe the sites and their work, but before that it is probably worth trying to do a bit of ontological anchoring – just what is it that we’re all trying to do? One of the key people here has come up with the term ‘Adapted TC’ – which is a stroke of genius and immediately cuts through all the hoo-haa about whether what they are doing is making this type of TC or that type of TC. They are strongly basing their plans on the book, but also sorting out the details as they go along; in a way, all TCs are ‘Adapted’ in that they must ‘grow in their own soil’, be willing adapt (in a Darwinian way) in order to survive in their particular environment, and to their unique mixture of whoever they have for members, and wherever the staff are coming from. But within a framework of ‘TC’ as described and evidenced in the literature – of which the book is a part. ‘Feather bed, iron frame’ as I remember from my psychotherapy training as a little group analytic motto.

But I do get a strong sense that the ‘Relational Practice’ movement is gaining ground as an underlying concept – of which TCs and EEs (and other non-directive and non-paternalistic ways of working) are examples. Of course, this is not uniquely 'TC-ish', but clearly finds favour here in Canada as it does with our INLLE, INDTC and IIPDW colleagues elsewhere. The sense in the UK is that the planned July event is gathering momentum – particularly how the visual flash of the draft manifesto does stimulate positive reactions (regardless of the ‘minor’ details!). In Vancouver, the vote was strongly in favour having extra time on ‘the Golden Thread of Relational Practice’ (20, to 12 for accreditation, 7 for discussing our visit to East Hastings, and 0 for general Q&A) - which I take as a vote for wanting to find a way of understanding our work at substantial depth. And not just seeking solutions, recipes or answers...