Self-help groups for mental health are voluntary associations of people who share a common desire to overcome mental illness or otherwise increase their level of cognitive or emotional wellbeing. There are several international mental health self-help organizations including Emotions Anonymous, the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance (DBSA), GROW, and Recovery International. Recovery International uses a cognitive training approach similar to cognitive-behavioral therapy, Emotions Anonymous uses a twelve-step approach, whereas GROW incorporates a combination of cognitive training and twelve-step methods. DBSA affiliates sponsor support groups using a variety of techniques Despite the different approaches, many of the psychosocial processes in the groups are the same and they share similar relationships with mental health professionals. The terms 'self-help', 'mutual-help' and 'mutual-aid' are used interchangeably in this context.
Read more about Self-help Groups For Mental Health: Classification, Group Processes, Relationship With Mental Health Professionals, Effectiveness, Criticism, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words mental health, self-help, groups, mental and/or health:
“A major misunderstanding of child rearing has been the idea that meeting a child’s needs is an end in itself, for the purpose of the child’s mental health. Mothers have not understood that this is but one step in social development, the goal of which is to help a child begin to consider others. As a result, they often have not considered their children but have instead allowed their children’s reality to take precedence, out of a fear of damaging them emotionally.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“The American people are doing their job today. They should be given a chance to show whether they wish to preserve the principles of individual and local responsibility and mutual self-help before they embark on what I believe to be a disastrous system. I feel sure they will succeed if given the opportunity.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot—a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life—of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“It was at a particular moment in the history of my own rages that I saw the Western world conditioned by the images of Marx, Darwin and Freud; and Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western world. The simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.”
—William Golding (b. 1911)
“Even though I had let them choose their own socks since babyhood, I was only beginning to learn to trust their adult judgment.. . . I had a sensation very much like the moment in an airplane when you realize that even if you stop holding the plane up by gripping the arms of your seat until your knuckles show white, the plane will stay up by itself. . . . To detach myself from my children . . . I had to achieve a condition which might be called loving objectivity.”
—Anonymous Parent of Adult Children. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 5 (1978)