Therapeutic community is a disaster-sociology term for the temporary emergence of intensified cooperation, mutual support, and shared purpose after catastrophe [@gurney1977].
The term matters because it counters the image of disaster as automatic social breakdown. Patrick Gurney’s review of the concept, building on Charles Fritz and Allen Barton, treats it as a way of naming the new social order that can arise when communities adapt to disaster-created needs [@gurney1977].
Related terms
- Emergent citizen groups - one form the therapeutic community can take in organized action
- Elite panic - a pattern in which authorities fear the cooperative capacity that disaster can reveal
- Paradigms of Emergent Disaster Response - a research text situating this term within the school’s larger shifts