is considered by many psychiatrists to have been the first example of an intentional therapeutic community. But this story is prone to adopt a origin myth approach. The principles developed at Northfield were also developed and adapted at Civil Resettlement Units established at the end of the war to help returning prisoners of war to adapt back to civilian society and for civilians to adapt to having these men back amongst them. The term was coined by Thomas Main in his 1946 paper, "The hospital as a therapeutic institution", and subsequently developed by others including Maxwell Jones, R. D. Laing at the Philadelphia Association, David Cooper at Villa 21, and Joshua Bierer. Under the influence of Maxwell Jones, Main, Wilmer and others (Caudill 1958; Rapoport 1960), combined with the publications of critiques of the existing mental health system (Greenblatt et al. 1957, Stanton and Schwartz 1954) and the sociopolitical influences that permeated the psychiatric world towards the end of and following the Second World War, the concept of the therapeutic community and its attenuated form – the therapeutic milieu – caught on and dominated the field of inpatient psychiatry throughout the 1960s. The first development of therapeutic community in a large institution took place at Claybury Hospital under the guidance of Denis Martin and John Pippard. Beginning in 1955 it involved over 2,000 patients and hundreds of staff. The aim of therapeutic communities was a more democratic, user-led form of therapeutic environment, avoiding the authoritarian and demeaning practices of many psychiatric establishments of the time. The central philosophy is that clients are active participants in their own and each other's mental health treatment and that responsibility for the daily running of the community is shared among the clients and the staff. One phrase commonly used to summarise this treatment philosophy is 'the Community as Doctor'. 'TC's have sometimes eschewed or limited medication in favor of group-based therapies. The Henderson Hospital first established in 1947 by Maxwell Jones and named after David Henderson evolved the specific concept of Democratic Therapeutic Community (DTC). Admission to and early discharge from the one year of residential treatment was by majority vote and residents of the DTC always held the majority in these votes. No psychotropic medication or one to one therapy sessions were available and so all the work of the DTC was pursued, on the one hand, in small or larger therapy groups