Therapeutic Community Treatment Model

“The primary goal of a Therapeutic Community is to foster individual change and positive growth. This is accomplished by changing an individual’s lifestyle through a community of concerned people working together to help themselves and each other.” 
- Therapeutic Communities of America, Inc.

Through peer involvement and support, members become more aware of their self-destructive behaviours and learn to readapt as they begin to conform to community norms. In a Therapeutic Community, social interaction between people is the main factor that brings about change. Change itself becomes an experiential journey — not merely a conceptual talk. In a Therapeutic Community, members can “walk the talk” while sharing their experiences and supporting each other.

Likened to a micro-society, with the critical deletion of drug and alcohol use and antisocial behaviour, the Therapeutic Community contains many of the elements of the larger macro-society, including a daily regimen of work and education, social relationships and an occupational structure.  Individual progression up the hierarchy of job functions is much like the movement up the occupational ladder in “society”.  One of the significant differences, apart from the obvious, separating the Therapeutic community from the rest of society is the “trial-and-error” learning that fosters an environment in which one can fail safely.  This is in contrast to society “the outside world” where there is greater risk of loss, humiliation, or punishment from performance failure.

The Therapeutic Community has proven to be a powerful approach for substance abuse and related problems in living.  While fundamentally a self-help approach, it evolved primarily outside of mainstream psychiatry, psychology, and medicine.  Today, the Therapeutic Community is a sophisticated human services modality as evident in the range of its services, the diversity of the population served and the developing body of Therapeutic Community related research.