About Elly Jansen OBE
Elly was born in Holland in 1929, the sixth of nine children. Growing up during Nazi occupation and on the front line between German and Allied armies, she witnessed firsthand the impact of trauma. Elly remembered escaping to safety by crawling through a live battlefield with her siblings, mentally praying for God to keep them safe, an experience that profoundly affected her and gave her a deep belief in God.
After the war, Elly studied psychology, trained as a nurse, and worked with disturbed children before moving to England in 1955, initially to train as a missionary. It was at that time that Elly recognised the need for support for people recently discharged from mental hospitals to adjust to daily life, and decided to refocus her energy on helping people in this way instead.
Using the £100 she had for her theological studies, Elly rented a house in Richmond, where those leaving hospital could find community support. After placing a notice in a local hospital, she waited six weeks for her first applicant, marking the beginning of her first therapeutic community. Elly lived in the first community herself, alongside her residents. They ate together, shopped together, and made decisions that affected the community democratically as a group. Everyone was expected to play their part.
Its success led Elly to establish the Richmond Fellowship, through which she promoted the reintegration of mental health patients into mainstream society.
Elly’s approach balanced helping people to accept themselves as they are in order to build the inner strength to overcome their mental illness, while challenging them enough to promote growth and see their potential. What we might now call positive risk-taking.
While Elly became clear that there should be leadership from skilled, authentic and empathetic staff, she also emphasised the importance of staff and residents managing the community together. In Elly’s communities, there was a true sense of belonging. As the noted psychiatrist R.D. Laing once said, "She brought love into mental healthcare."
Under her leadership, Richmond Fellowship grew to include over 50 therapeutic communities in Britain. One of its early patrons was Princess Alexandra. Elly also founded Richmond Fellowship International, establishing therapeutic communities in Australia, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong and the United States amongst others.
In that time, she published two seminal works, ‘The Therapeutic Community: Outside the Hospital’ and ‘Towards a Whole Society’, which outline her philosophy and the principles of her therapeutic approach.
In 1980, Elly was appointed an OBE in recognition of her contributions.
Describing her work she said: ‘It began with few preconceived ideas apart from the firm belief that people’s behaviour makes sense, and that the clue to the reconciliation and integration of the ‘sick’ individual with society lies neither in the authentication of extreme ‘sickness’ nor in identification with ‘sane’ society and its demands, but in establishing contact with and between the two’ (Elly Jansen, The Therapeutic Community).
Elly was Director of the Richmond Fellowship and the Richmond Fellowship International for just over 20 years. She spoke at multiple conferences around the world, as well as publishing her two books and various articles, and, both directly and through her rigorous therapeutic staff training at the Richmond Fellowship College, had an enormous influence on the therapeutic community movement and relational practice more generally.
She went on to found several other charities (including what became Community Housing and Therapy (CHT)) and involved herself with the theory and practice of therapeutic communities for the rest of her life. Even in her later years,
Elly still cared passionately about therapeutic communities and about research, and about making the work of therapeutic communities more widely known.
t was her idea to create an Award for original research and articles on therapeutic communities; and so the Elly Jansen Award was born. She generously donated a sum to enable the Award, and the CHT Board of Trustees agreed that CHT would administer it through a Committee to oversee the process and to make the recommendations for the Award.
The Committee is composed of a number of people who have been committed to and active in the world of therapeutic communities and relational practice across the world; there are members from the UK, Italy, India, Japan and the USA, psychotherapists, academics, social workers and experts by experience, men and women, younger Committee members, and not-so-young-anymore members too.
The Award is part of Elly’s legacy
