CooperRiis Healing Community

About

CooperRiis Healing Community, founded in 2003 by Don Cooper and Lisbeth Riis Cooper, operates residential healing communities in Asheville and Mill Spring, North Carolina, within the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains. The organization extends the psychoanalytic therapeutic community tradition established at institutions like the Cassel Hospital and Chestnut Lodge, where recovery is understood not as passive receipt of treatment but as active participation in a life of meaning and purpose. The CooperRiis model integrates individual psychotherapy with a structured work program in which each resident spends up to twenty hours per week contributing to the communal life of the organization — a practice grounded in the depth-psychological insight that selfhood is constituted through engagement with others and the material world. The clinically intensive Asheville campus provides short-term residential treatment, while the Farm at Mill Spring offers a long-term therapeutic working farm where residents tend land, care for animals, and participate in agricultural cycles as vehicles for psychological growth. The integration of individual and group therapy, psychiatry, wellness activities, yoga, outdoor recreation, massage, targeted nutrition, exercise, and mindfulness-based practices creates a comprehensive treatment environment. CARF-accredited and having served over twenty-two hundred residents since its founding, CooperRiis treats anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorders, personality disorders, PTSD, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and neurodiversity-related conditions.

Depth Orientation

CooperRiis embodies the therapeutic community tradition that descends directly from psychoanalytic innovations in residential treatment. The model — where residents engage in twenty hours per week of meaningful communal work alongside clinical therapy — reflects the psychodynamic insight that identity and selfhood are constituted through purposeful engagement with the world and relational participation in community life. Each resident is paired with a licensed therapist for weekly individual psychotherapy, and the integration of mind and heart (the organization's guiding principle) echoes depth psychology's emphasis on the reunion of conscious and unconscious dimensions of the self through embodied, relational experience.

Treatment Modalities

Program Details

Best for

• Schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder
• Bipolar disorder
• Major depressive disorders
• Personality disorders
• PTSD
• Failure to launch

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