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From a special issue of History of Psychiatry also called "The processes and context of innovation in mental healthcare: Oxfordshire as a case study", Guest edited by Neil Armstrong and John Hall
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Organised Happenstance: The Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre
The nature and purpose of the Planned Environment Therapy Trust Archive and Study Centre (1989-2018) are illustrated in the history of the "Oxford Project" itself, and its outcome in these papers, as unpredictably predictable consequences of relationship and prepared happenstance. The Archive and Study Centre itself (as a unitary concept; but abbreviated hereafter as the Archive), was instituted initially within a therapeutic community, with both an archivist (Craig Fees), and Trustees who were experienced in therapeutic community. It was devoted to the history and work of enabling and therapeutic environments generally, and actively sought out and engaged with organisations, individuals and institutions past and present, as well as students and researchers, on a variety of levels: to raise awareness and mutual awareness, and promote research and discovery; gather and protect the raw materials of history, including oral history; promote tools and media of communication and inter-communication, including those emerging around the nascent Internet; and took an active part as a working and contributing member in the organisations themselves, with an additional outreach function. Through these involvements and over several years - having been mentioned to one another by others, and as names in interviews and publications - two of the co-authors of these papers, Craig Fees and David Millard, became aware of one another and finally met in 2000. Millard had been drawn into formal historical research and writing during the previous decade by his friend, and historian of psychiatry, Hugh Freeman1. After the 2000 meeting, and over several more years, Millard developed this work in connection with the Archive, which finally precipitated out in 2007 into a proposal which ultimately involved the History of Medicine units at both Warwick and Birmingham Universities for a "Therapeutic Communities in Mental Hospitals " research project, in the lead up to which two further authors of these papers, Peter Agulnik and David Kennard, became involved. The imminence of Bertram Mandelbrote's death in 2010 led Agulnik to reflect on Mandelbrote's life and work, and with the introduction of co-author John Hall to the team in 2011, and the perspective he brought as a medical historian with local clinical knowledge of Oxford, this interest crystallised into the formalisation of the "Oxford Project" in 2012. Through the developing progress of relationships and happenstance this led to the involvement of co-authors Jonathan Leach and Neil Armstrong. The role of the Archive throughout was one of anchorage, providing a common and persisting background point of reference; creating an actively facilitating environment organised for discovery and happenstance, as well as practical support; organised for meaningful chance encounters, enabling happenstance by design2.
1 D.W. Millard, "Maxwell Jones and the Therapeutic Community" (1996) in H. Freeman and G.Berrios, 150 Years of British Psychiatry. Vol. II: The Aftermath (pp 581-604); D.W. Millard, "Therapeutic Communities" (1999) in A Century of Psychiatry (pp. 155-159).
2 See, for example, David Kennard, “Alexis Korner's Therapeutic Community and the Birth of British Blues”, Therapeutic Communities 22:1, pp. 19-28
