Psychosocial support after Grenfell: recovery and solidarity with a community in crisis

The Grenfell Tower fire of June 2017 was the most lethal residential fire in the UK since the Second World War, causing 72 deaths and leaving over 200 families without homes. This research is an auto-ethnographic case study of an innovative psychosocial counselling project that supported survivors, bereaved families and local residents affected by the fire, over a five-year period. My focus is on the way that therapeutic practitioners adapted to working with the Grenfell community in two non-clinical settings: hotels where families were displaced after the disaster, and the Public Inquiry into its causes. Supporting survivors within these spaces called for the development of a new psychosocial intervention that was more flexible, proactive and informal than conventional forms of therapeutic practice.

I draw on my experience of coordinating and delivering this service, alongside interviews with other therapeutic practitioners, situating my analysis within the larger sociopolitical context of the disaster and its aftermath. My findings centre on three key dimensions of the therapeutic framework: Firstly, I discuss the development of culturally responsive practices of engagement within a diverse community setting; secondly, I explore how the counselling service adapted to working within spaces that were open and precarious, lacking the secure boundaries of the conventional therapeutic frame; finally, I examine the way that the service negotiated the ethics of both solidarity and clinical neutrality within a site of political conflict.

These findings demonstrate ways that therapeutic practice can strengthen its engagement with larger social processes of collective suffering and recovery, calling for greater critical reflexivity in relation to issues of power, race and inequality. This case study offers a framework for developing new collaborative therapeutic models that expand the capacities of psychological practitioners to effectively engage with racialised communities, people in crisis and the survivors of structural violence and trauma beyond clinical settings.