On June 3rd I landed in Norway to attend the conference, Beyond the Therapeutic State: Collaborative Practices for Individual and Social Change. There were 200 participants from 24 different countries. Where we came from varied. There were many well known academics from universities around the world, people who have struggled with schizophrenia and have been hurt by forced hospitalization and medication, and practitioners of a wide variety of therapeutic approaches. What we had in common was a commitment to creating alternative approaches to emotional growth.
Early at the conference I brought all of you into the dialogue – patients, colleagues, community members and helping professionals interested in social therapy. We were having a conversation about the harm done by the medical model of labeling and medication, and forced institutionalized treatment. I asked, “Where are the voices of our patients, our communities? Are we talking to them? What is it they have to say? Collaborative therapy needs to include all of our voices.” I met many practitioners who agreed and were eager to hear more. I talked about our work together and how our focus on social activism and building community are necessary activities for emotional growth and development.
I spoke with Sheila McNamee, a leading social constructionist, about the importance of community organizing. Sheila asked me to talk about our community work. I explained how the STG is part of a movement of social activism, of community building – the All Stars Project, social therapy as a non-diagnostic therapy, our therapists going out on the street corner asking people, “Does our community need therapy? What does our community think about diagnostics?”
In his opening remarks, Ken Gergen, a leading post modernist and the primary organizer of the conference, spoke out passionately against the therapeutic state. He spoke about the damage done by the medical model and psychiatry’s need to label, predict and control human beings. Ken talked about the need to come together as progressives in mental health to create new ways of helping people with emotional difficulties. He asked “Can we come together to do something about the oppression of diagnostics and forced medication?”
A wonderful session was led by Carina Håkansson, a compassionate practitioner who has created the Family Care Foundation in Sweden. She works with people who have serious emotional difficulties and places them with families on neighboring farms. In a documentary about her work made by Brian Mackler, it is vividly clear that what is required to help people grow is compassion not drugs or diagnostics. The notable absence of pathologizing the client and people’s ongoing growth is stunning. One farmer notes that relationships with the farm animals can be helpful to people. He heard voices himself at one point in his life and being on the farm with family helped him get better. Carina and her staff have outstanding success in transforming the lives of people with schizophrenia and other emotional difficulties.
On the second day of the conference, I led a workshop with Pal Carlin, a family therapist in Oslo who trained in social therapy at the East Side Institute a number of years ago. I was his supervisor. Pal and I designed an asystematic exploration of the human capacity to perform and its implications for emotional growth and development. We called our session Therapy Interrupted: Performing Social Therapy.
Why “therapy interrupted?” We talked with people about how social therapy interrupts our fascination with the self and helps us shift our gaze to the group. It stops us from digging deep into our patients’ psyches in favor of helping them create new ensemble performances. It disturbs our patients’ notion that therapy is all about them and introduces them to the other. It challenges the model of traditional psychology in favor of exploring, creating and playing with subjectivity as social relational and cultural activity.
In the session, we showed a section of a dialogue between Ken Gergen, a leading post modernist and Fred Newman, the founder of social therapy, about the importance of performance – how it doesn’t so much matter what we are talking about but how we are talking! Participants then performed Ken and Fred’s conversation.
We invited the participants to perform transcripts of actual social therapy groups from my practice at the Social Therapy Group in NYC. They had many reactions to our work. Some were interested, enthusiastic and curious. Others were critical and concerned about how the therapist challenges the patients’ conceptual framework of what therapy is! More on this in my next blog.
The conference ended with Ken Gergen asking people to take more responsibility for what is happening in the world. He spoke passionately on the need to build a movement. He urged us to keep the dialogue going.
I want to do that with all of you.
First, by inviting you to our upcoming local, national and international community event sponsored by the East Side Institute, Performing the World from Oct 10th – Oct 12th. Educators, social activists, mental health professionals and artists will be coming together to share and showcase their work, build community, and create something new using the developmental power of performance. Do join us.
Second, I’d like to begin a new conversation with you. As many of you know the history of social therapy lives in the activity of community building and social activism as essential to creating the conditions needed for emotional growth. Social therapy is a community therapy. Building community makes it work!
How do you see the relationship between community building and our capacity to grow emotionally?
Do you think it is important? If so, tell us about your experiences.
I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks for coming to Norway! More to follow…
Christine LaCerva
The Community Therapist 
Christine I think what you’re doing is a healthy and proactive approach to helping change the way we as a world help one another! This article provides such amazing insight to helping one another and considering we are all emotional creatures!
I see the relationship between community building and our capacity to grow emotionally as something that goes hand in hand. Community building gives people an opportunity to communicate with one another and allow brand new or too familiar experiences to be recognized in others. These opportunities may bring forth a chance at emotional growth in terms of understanding, tolerance, and sensitivity towards the differences of others. These opportunities may also bring someone closer to healing as communication will most definitely help focus attention on other people dealing with their own separate issues which may in fact be related to their own.
This will help in so many ways. I anticipate that a good sum of people who believe they suffer alone will in time discover they are far from alone. This will in my opinion help in diminishing the mental digging that occurs in traditional therapy sessions which often leads to self mental deconstruction.
In my experiences I’ve observed loved ones perplex themselves in an attempt to try and figure out what was wrong with them and often categorize themselves as one in a million with based on the issues or self concerns they had. It wasn’t until they began to open up and discuss their concerns with supportive friends who in fact had some of the same insecurities or uncertainties as them that they realized these feelings they had were perfectly normal and not entirely unique to just them.
I’ll wrap up by saying in this moment I know loved ones that seem to have become almost comfortable with believing they have a deficit which in their opinion makes them sub-par in comparison to everyone else. I think my loved ones as well as others with similar self perceptions would benefit from this movement of social therapy. I am very hopeful for the success of “Therapy Interrupted.”
Anissa
Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments.
This is excellent! Using cultural activities to treat patients instead of having them on an ongoing medication is what our world needs now. Sometimes these medications tend to shut the brain down; and if this happens, where do we go? If having therapy through social relationships will help patients to develop more, then our communities need this change.
I also agree. I myself have had depression and although I was never prescribed any medication, there are people I know that are depressed and have been taking medication for a very long time. I believe that taking medication without really trying anything else first can probably destroy someone’s cognitive thinking so much that they become a different person off the medication.. then it always becomes uncomfortable for them. There are many different steps that can be taken other than medication, and when a professional feels like that the very first step they need to take, then the patient should try going to someone who cares instead of someone who is just there for the money.
I completely agree with you. I believe that prescription medication should be the last resort to treat a patient. I truly believe that talking to someone about your feelings is a much better way to treat mental health. I was diagnosed with depression and the amount of medicine that was given to me was overwhelming, instead I started surrounding myself with people and talking to a therapist. Never took those meds and I feel great!.
Cynthia
Thanks for writing in. Good for you. Sounds like you made a growthful decision.
It’s good to know that some professionals don’t agree with prescribing medication to deal with emotional distress. I feel that when you give someone medication especially for emotional distress, it can make things worse. People start depending on these medications to feel better. When you are emotional distress is better to talk about it than to take medication. When you take medication it doesn’t really do much but numbs you for a couple of hours then you come back to reality and you still feel the same way you did before. When you talk about your problems you are getting the chance to vent, to express what’s eating you up inside. You also get the chance to understand why is it that you’re feeling that way but with medication you don’t. Medication are meant to help but do they really? Some people get addicted to these medications. Not only would they have emotional distress but they would also have an addiction problem. So no, medication don’t always make everything better. I myself took some therapy at some point in my life and I must say it was worth it. It helped me out in a lot of ways I didn’t think it would’ve.
I agree, too often patients are subjected to prescriptions and forced into taking something for the rest of their lives. Prescribing should be a last resort, not a first step. Or in some cases not a step at all.
Great!! I love your report and the way professional and patients are getting together to talk and be hear. I agree and feel that a person who emotionally in distress do not need to be prescribes. I totally agree and feel that talking is a perfect way of therapy, sometimes the best medicine a person can have is to be heard. I’m very grateful that professionals can get together and look for better solution for another human being.
I believe this is the constant propaganda that has been happening for a long time now. The ever going concept of labeling emotional issues people have is just another way to control and categorize them. No one should be in a category especially if it affects how they live, see, think and feel about themselves. Therapy should be a form of expression, not limited to the wanting and needs of drugs that in the end harm them of limits their upmost potential. Drugs are just a means to numb and control people. They are much more healthier fun filled ways explore than people. Ask yourself is this right to put this person on medication if there were others ways to communicate? I say explore life and learn to have fun and enjoy life that’s what makes everyone the happiest.
I find this report every important because it lets others know about the issue of people taking medicine with now need to and it also demonstrates that something is being done about it. I am happy to hear that a group of intelligent people got together to discuss and try and find a solution to the problem. It makes me feel much better to know that the issue is being address and exposed at the same time.
Naom
You are so right that any real response to this is acknowledging that diagnostics and overly medicating people has to be followed by doing something about it. One thing we are doing is creating opportunities for our communities to weigh in on how they want to create and organize mental health services. Hearing the voices of ordinary people is vitally important as we are the consumers of mental health services and we have the right to say what and how we want to be treated.
Thanks for writing in.
I agree that organizations and advocates play an important role in bringing social justice especially for such as vulnerable population like the mentally ill who are usually taken advantage of.
Sounds like a very inspiring conference. I am so glad you and Paul Carlin had the opportunity to share the social therapy contribution to the larger movement / dialogue on progressive, creative, humane therapies.
Thank you for the important question how do we see the relationship between community building and emotional development? I very much see the activity of group work every week with our clients as a powerful, messy, confusing, rewarding, difficult, painful, joyful form of community building. For both my clients and me!
How are we doing? What do we want to do together tonight? Do we have the conditions to talk about this? What the hell are conditions? Are you taking the group with you? How do I do that?! Exploring regularly questions such as these is the activity of building a therapeutic community together.
One group client who is finishing her Masters in Counseling and just completed her group counseling course shared that our way of doing group is unique and that she is glad and challenged by social therapy. Unlike what she was taught in class, social therapy group is not a ready-made, scripted format created by the therapist to intervene/implement onto clients. And that’s the powerfulness of our approach: the weird and hard activity of building our therapy together as a team.
A therapy that is not pre-scripted helps us emotionally. We can live life in the grocery store, at home, at work, in the doctor’s office relating to ourselves and others as active co-producers. co-creators of every scene. There is no need for labels such as mentally ill person-healthy person, victim-victimizer, right-wrong, etc. but instead a creative, writing-the-script-together-as-we-go called how do we want to do this together?
Jennifer
Thanks for your honest and thoughtful response.
I am heartened by this report, Christine – thank you. As someone who, like most of us, has grown up in a culture obsessed with individuality, it is a welcome struggle to participate in the creation of a therapeutic community where the focus is on the group, the other, rather than the self. As you say above, the world is increasingly frightening and it is easy to retreat into ourselves. I am grateful for the loving demand to continue developing our capacity as givers and world-changers.
Great report Christine! And good to hear how you are bringing social therapy into the conversation on need for alternative therapies.
Thanks Jan. Given everything that is going on in an increasingly turbulent and frightening world, alternative therapies that focus on development and the fundamental sociality of who we are as human beings are key to creating our mental health.