The Power of Community in Mental Health Recovery

To mark Mental Health Awareness Week 2025 and its theme of community, our Head of Psychotherapy, Dr Andreas Constandinos, reflects on the power of community in supporting people to find connection.

In Civilisation and Its Discontents, Freud argues that the decisive step towards making us more civilised is the replacement of power from the individual to the community. In other words, in order for us to live in society, we need a community.

The original German title of Freud’s book is Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which can also be translated as something like The Uneasiness Inherent in Culture, which removes the ‘and’ in the current English translation, suggesting that we should not make a distinction between civilisation and being discontent. Again, in other words, whilst we need a community to function in a society, being in a community is challenging, or to use the German word "unbehagen", it is discomforting or uneasy.

In 2009, I undertook a clinical psychology graduate work placement at the South London and Maudsley. My primary task during the placement was to set up and co-facilitate a Hearing Voices Group for residents diagnosed with schizophrenia in the borough of Lambeth. We had funding to run the group for eighteen weeks.

Eight individuals, five women and three men, attended the first group, and seven of the eight remained with the group until it ended. Despite coming from very diverse backgrounds, the group had a lot in common:

• All of them had experienced being detained under the Mental Health Act

• All of them had been taking anti-psychotic medication for many years

• None of them lived independently, and

• All of them were extremely socially isolated.

They had all experienced a considerable amount of shame around the events that had led to them being diagnosed with schizophrenia and had been silenced from being able to connect with others due to the stigma that comes from hearing voices.

During the eighteen weeks of the group, we introduced our members to a psycho-social understanding of what had happened to them, which meant replacing the question of what was wrong with them with what had happened to them.

Initially, we had to rely on two very courageous members who took the lead in sharing their experiences. Slowly, as the weeks went on and the group became an increasingly safe space, others started to open up, discovering a degree of shared experience.

The group was challenging, or should I say, at times an uneasy place to be, but it also helped a group of very disconnected individuals find connection with others who could understand, at least some of what they had experienced. We had the beginnings of a community.

It has been almost fifteen years since the group ended, and I still receive an annual ‘Christmas email’ from one of the members in which I am updated on the fact that after the group ended in 2010, the members decided to continue with the group independently and have continued to meet to this very day every week.

Friendships were formed, and this has allowed some of the members to re-enter society by engaging in activities like sport, volunteering, travel, and even study.

This is the power of community.

Dr Andreas Constandinos, our Head of Psychotherapy