The Cassel Hospital, based in lovely buildings in on the south side of Ham Common, is an important therapeutic community both historically and in its current form. It was the place where the late Tom Main put into practice his thinking about the therapeutic community way of working and it continues to operate a residential therapeutic community within the National Health Service operating on strongly psychoanalytic theoretical lines.
In the sixties, 'whole' families could live within Cassel ~ while the parent whose mental health needed repair got on with group therapy, us children roamed the extensive grounds, made friends with the gardener & cooks, while maintaining a healthy distance from the many singular patient/inmates; a man who couldn't bear any loud noise, for example, homosexuals (still illegal then), young, chaotic women with a range of unstable behaviours ~ all in all, an education in human frailty & madness.
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