Dr. Mitchell S. Rosenthal, the founder of Phoenix House, the largest private nonprofit therapeutic drug-treatment program in the United States, died on Nov. 14 in Manhattan. He was 87.

Dr. Rosenthal, a psychiatrist, popularized a regimen of abstinence and group therapy in a communal residential setting where people could recover from drug and alcohol addiction, as well as address other behavioral problems. He started Phoenix House in 1967 in a former flophouse on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The program grew from there into a nationwide network that by the 1990s had residential treatment centers in 10 states and in some prisons. Programs in Britain, the Netherlands and Israel were established on the Phoenix House model.