Arbours Crisis Centre

About

The Arbours Crisis Centre, established as part of the Arbours Association — an internationally recognized psychotherapy charity with over fifty years of clinical history — offers residential psychoanalytic care as an alternative to conventional psychiatric hospitalization. Located at 41 Weston Park in North London, the Centre operates as a small therapeutic community applying psychoanalytic thinking to work with individuals in states of acute emotional disturbance, including psychotic episodes. The Association's approach draws on the tradition of R.D. Laing and the Philadelphia Association, emphasizing the therapeutic potential of community living and the primacy of the therapist-patient relationship. Historically, the Arbours also operated three therapeutic community houses providing longer-term residential care, and while its training programme has ceased, the psychotherapy service continues to embody the relational psychoanalytic tradition. The Crisis Centre represents one of the few remaining residential alternatives to hospital admission rooted explicitly in psychoanalytic principles, carrying forward a lineage of anti-institutional psychoanalytic practice that views acute psychological crisis as meaningful psychic experience rather than mere symptom to be suppressed.

Depth Orientation

The Arbours Crisis Centre is a small residential psychoanalytic therapeutic community that provides an alternative to psychiatric hospitalization for adults in acute psychological crisis. Rooted in a robust study and application of psychoanalytic and relational theory, the Centre focuses on the quality of the relationship between therapist and patient as the primary agent of therapeutic change. The Arbours Association maintains a community of approximately seventy psychoanalytic psychotherapists trained in its distinctive tradition, which integrates object relations theory with therapeutic community principles.

Treatment Modalities

Program Details

Best for

• Acute psychological crisis
• Psychotic episodes requiring non-hospital alternative
• Severe emotional disturbance
• Adults who have not responded to conventional psychiatric care

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