Who’s it for?
Anyone curious about a fresh approach, including people and families with personal experience of mental distress, frontline staff, commissioners, managers, clinicians, policymakers and Third Sector staff.
Who’s speaking?
Our speakers and facilitators are passionate about transforming mental health and changing the script. All believe that with the right support living a full life after a mental health crisis is possible.
Radical Hospitality | 20 Oct 2025, Kingsley Hall, Bromley-By-Bow, London, UK
Radical Hospitality is a one-day gathering continuing our exploration of alternative approaches for living and working with mental distress. Inspired by intentional, eco and therapeutic communities, we aim to bridge the gap between the ambitions of mental health policy and the realities of practice on the ground.
The thread that runs through all our gatherings is building community together – moving beyond Us and Them, the Fixers and those that need Fixing. We want to create spaces where those who may need to use services, those who deliver them, and the families and networks around a person in distress can come together so that everyone can thrive.
So join us for a nourishing day of learning, reflection and community – a pop-up therapeutic community where we explore how to create safe, compassionate spaces that hold both suffering and joy. Together we’ll ask what it takes to support people in extreme states, discover meaning in difficult experiences, and reclaim crisis as a potential turning point.
At Kingsley Hall, Laing, Joseph Berke and others once lived alongside people in extreme states, pioneering approaches that were creative, relational, and often controversial. Joe later co-founded the Arbours Crisis Centre, where therapists and guests shared everyday life. His legacy lives on in our work, reminding us that healing doesn’t happen in isolation but in the social and relational environments that surround us.
Radical hospitality means choosing presence over fixing, relationship over control, and community over isolation. It asks us to welcome not only the stranger outside us, but also the exiled and difficult parts of ourselves. Through conversation, workshops, creativity and eating together, we’ll explore what it takes to help someone heal after crisis and reclaim their future … and how to create more spaces of belonging, structure and true safety where healing can happen.
Drawing on contemplative traditions and therapeutic community practice, we will explore together how relationship, dignity and belonging can form the ground of mental health care. We’ll also look honestly at safety and risk, holding complexity with compassion.
As always, we move beyond professional, personal and illness labels so we can build common ground and imagine safe, healing services that people want to use when in crisis.
The programme builds on our core themes of connection, community and systems change, with a focus on reflective, relational, compassionate practice, and creating therapeutic environments.
Together we’ll explore new ways of thinking about service provision, and explore approaches that are based on mutual support, safety and democratic principles.
As always, moving away from professional, personal and illness labels so we can build common ground and imagine together safe, healing services that people want to use when they are in crisis.
Register Today and join us in changing the conversation around “serious mental illness” – challenging stigma and raising expectations.
