In Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windemere’s Fan, Lord Darlington comments that a cynic was ‘a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’  Anyone growing up in postwar Britain will have heard their parents use this phrase, but since the millennium it seems that cost generally trumps values within our straining economy.

In what way should we value therapeutic communities and therapeutic environments and does this ‘valuing’ stand up to economic scrutiny?  How do we evaluate therapeutic communities and their contribution to society, both therapeutically and politically, as a technology of change – for example – as a form of readjustment and rebalancing of an unfair society, or as places where people and groups can discover a sense of their own value when this has become lost?  What is the social return on such an investment?

Sustainable organisations will often face a tension between their internal identity and the external reality, between holding onto cherished tradition and opening up to new ideas and innovation. Where are the values and principals enshrined in psychoanalysis, therapeutic communities and enabling environments heading? Can these be reinvented in non-TC settings: e.g. in psychiatric services, schools, probation, addictions, eating disorders, elderly care, the military or even in Government?    

We can also think about, and perhaps we need to, the cost of the therapeutic community approach? There is the financial cost – e.g. what is the Government prepared to pay in a contract that delivers a set of medical outcomes?  But there is also a different kind of cost: the cost at the human level of requiring professional staff to work at the depth and fullness of their capacity that TCs and EEs require. Is this adequately supported, and how should this be done? 

And, importantly, how is it for those who come to use the TC as members; how do they value the experience compared to other modalities and models, and how effective are we in supporting their ‘voices’ to come through. Finally, are there new and better ways that we can articulate, critically, theoretically, and through compelling, vivid examples of our work, the value of Therapeutic Communities?