may be more helpful than others. As practitioners, our impression is that P2P has contributed significantly to containment of a high level of disturbance in a reduced therapeutic community programme, allowing highly challenging work, more usually associated with 5-day or in-patient therapeutic communities, to proceed without compromise. We believe that adoption of this system makes the development of many more local therapeutic communities a cost-effective and realistic proposition, and that such communities should be central to the development of new community-based personality disorder services.