Dr Joseph (Joe) Berke, an author and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, was a pioneer in the therapeutic approach to dealing with psychosis without using medication.

Joe graduated from Columbia University and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and then moved to London in 1965 to work with the existential psychiatrist R D Laing. He assisted Laing in setting up Kingsley Hall, a therapeutic community where he worked intensively with Mary Barnes. Mary was a nurse who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. He helped her emerge from madness and become a prominent artist, writer and Christian mystic. Together they wrote Mary Barnes: two accounts of a journey through madness, which was later adapted as a stage play by David Edgar and translated into 13 languages.

 

In 1970 he co-founded the Arbours Housing Association in London, a landmark therapeutic community, to provide care and shelter for people in emotional distress. Later he founded and was the director of the Arbours Crisis Centre.  He believed that people with psychoses, schizophrenia and psychotic disorders can and do get better if they have a safe space in which to explore their suffering.

 

Joe would say that “most of what takes place in the name of psychiatric treatment is a form of shutting people up. At the Arbours, we take it that a person’s suffering, weird experiences or strange beliefs are a cry for help and an attempt to be understood. The way we can help them is to allow them to reach us through their suffering. We give them a space where if they need to, they can break down in order to break through”.

​

​

“People who have been traumatized need a sanctuary where they can regain a sense of themselves. 

 

This sanctuary can be temporal: days, weeks, or months, and it can be spatial: a calm, soothing, caring environment.  

 

Most of all it should be personal and interpersonal; a place where people who have been hurt by painful relationships can be helped through healing relationships.  Healing relationships which recognise the sanctity of their being.   

 

Then with luck, over time, people can reconstitute themselves and their place in the world.” 

 

Dr Joseph Berke, 02 Oct 2011