Jan 23 2009
Self-help groups
Who are they? What are they? Are they any use?
The generally accepted view is that 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.
Whilst offering a level of support by one’s peers in the absense of any useful therapy, they do - in mine opinion, have a few shortcomings:
Firstly, such groups may not really be specific enough, or far too specific. “Personality Disorder” encompasses a range of 9 or so disorders, but as such may all be subsumed into the gereral heading of “mental health” - hardly useful when dealing with such a range of experience and interpretation of reality. The members may not feel that their issues are being dealt with and that they have been dumped into a group comprising of the mental health services’ failures, which hardly helps one’s self-image.
Apart from overgeneralisation, groups may suffer from rigid structures and forumaic approaches to their clients, making them feel further like the working material of a sausage-processing factory. Whlst those who “stay the distance” may gain quite significantly from self-help groups, research shows that high attrition rates in such groups lead to about two-thirds of the small proportion who actually take up offered membership of such groups leave within a few months. This low success rate may well be due to the groups not usefully addressing the issues faced by their clients or by trying to mould them into their predetermined stereotypes. Personality disorders do not easily lend themselves to normal social interactions; this can be made far worse by having to interact only with people who are afflicted in some similar ways. I sometimes feel that “I want to be better; not to be like these people” which is hardly the basis of a cure by double negative association.
These dangers combined may heighten the risk that self-help group members may come to believe that group participation is a Panacea; that the group’s processes can remedy any problem; that all issues must be addressed to the group - the failure of the group to resolve all their perceived ills can lead either to rejection of the processes or to a cargo-cult mentality that leads to the following of pointless, empty patterns of behaviour in the belief that following them will lead - via some obsessively compulsive manner - to normal interpretations and interactions. A somewhat illogical conclusion.
Online versions of self-help groups offer all of the above and probably more - there is also the danger of the cult of personality / moderator - but, in the absense of anything else, either one has to continue to plough one’s own lonely furrow - increasing the sense of isolation and rejection - or risk it all and take that massive leap into the unknown and untrusted.
Given all the potentials for failure, they do actually help some people and - bearing all these possibilities and dangers in mind - I am willing to try again. To this end, I have replied to Borderline UK / Personality Plus after they got back to me after my initial enquiry, to help with the first two of my resolutions: publication and exhibition. Progress will be recounted in further posts.
