Spotlights the human stories within grassroots healing communities formed to help people overcome physical disabilities or mental disorders by living independently outside hospitals, nursing homes, and mental institutions.
For good reasons, Americans are growing concerned about the cost of health care and housing. There are many reasons why people need care-the addiction of a teenage child or spouse, an elderly relative in need of nursing home care, a psychological disorder, or a chronic medical condition—but even moderately successful institutional solutions for these problems are often too costly to be truly helpful. The cost of healthcare is so high it can result in homelessness. Leonard Jason and Martin Perdoux show us a relatively low-cost and effective solution growing in neighborhoods across the country: true community. People are moving in together to meet each other's needs and, in the process, create a much higher quality of life than they would find in an institution. People living together in these healing communities include the elderly, recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, and people suffering from mental illness, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, AIDS, or Multiple Chemical Sensitivity. These communities offer them a way to recover the caring, structure, direction, and respect that a strong family can provide. The authors of this work show us how communities created out of necessity by their members constitute a more sustained, natural means to healing.
In his foreword, Thomas Moore points out that the communities described in this book are not only physical homes, but also shelters for the soul, places to find the deepest kind of security. Here you will see concrete ways imaginative leaders help those in trouble find themselves rather than become dependent on institutions. It is a new and promising imagination of how social healing works: not by setting up more programs, but by treating people in trouble as human beings, with certain emotional and social needs. This book teaches how to re-imagine this whole process, and now, in an increasingly technical and lonely world, we need this precious wisdom more than ever.
Endorsements
I am going to use this book with my classes in community psychology because it embodies so much of what I want them to learn.... It is scholarly but passionate, thorough yet thoroughly readable. I have a space already reserved on my bookshelf for it, but I doubt it will get to sit on my shelf for very long.—Maurice J. Elias, Ph.D.,^LProfessor of Psychology and Coordinator, Internship Program in Applied, School, and Community Psychology^LRutgers University
Leonard Jason and Martin Perdoux have given us a warm-hearted, brilliantly illuminating recipe for improving the mental and physical health of Americans. As a people, as a organism of interlocking communities, we are lucky to have this good book.—James McManus,^Lauthor of ^IGoing to the Sun^R and ^IPositively Fifth Street^R
Supportive communities can restore people from illness. That is the thesis of Jason and Perdoux's new book, and they make their case compellingly. The many successful case studies cited do not depend on money, or on professional credentials; instead they rely on inner strengths within us, upon open-hearted and committed relationships of equals, sustained over time. Anyone looking for new ways to build caring, inclusive, and healing communities should not fail to read this book and heed its lessons.—Bill Berkowitz, Ph.D.,^LProfessor Emeritus of Psychology^LUniversity of Massachusetts, Lowell
Havens inspires, instructs, and offers practical ways of restoring the lost soul of contemporary life. It is the best book on community healing since the publication of ^IThe Therapeutic Community^R by Maxwell Jones more than fifty years ago and it once again declares how the best professionals support and encourage the deep healing that ordinary people instill in one another. Jason and Perdoux show how easily we lose contact with the truth that well being and vitality require committed and creative connections with others in everyday life situations where we are able to take responsibility, contribute, and discover how we need others to fulfill ourselves.—Shaun McNiff,^LUniversity Professor, Lesley University,^Land author of ^ICreating with Others^R
This is an engaging book full of hope, humanity and challege. It brings us face to face with the other, who has been pathologized, and embraces them as one of us, who all seek a life of grace, meaning, and community. Would that we in the social services, social sciences and public administration could empathize as well and take direction from the experiences of empowerment and connection found here.—John Moritsugu, Ph.D.,^LDepartment of Psychology^LPacific Luther University
