In the mental health field, a vigorous consumer and family movement - including groups such as the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association - involves hundreds of thousands of members and has caught the attention of the professional system. Understanding the Self-Help Organization provides detailed, comprehensive coverage of this phenomenon. This comprehensive volume focuses attention on three critical areas: public policy and self-help, participation - particularly by minorities - in self-help, and explanatory frameworks.
Self-help groups have encountered fierce criticism as places where individuals join to share personal problems and to engage in therapeutic intervention without the aid of skilled professionals. These groups have flourished since the 1970s and continue to serve more people than professional therapy. Yet these groups have been criticized as fostering a culture of whiners and victims, and not using professional help as needed. Thomasina Jo Borkman debunks this commonly held assessment, and also examines the reasons for these groups' enduring popularity since the 1960s--more people attend these meetings (word?) than see professional therapists. What accounts for their success and popularity? Understanding Self-Help / Mutual-Aid Groups is the first book to describe three stages of individual and group evolution that is part of this organization's very structure; it also reconceptualizes participants' interactions with professionals. The group as a whole, Borkman posits, draws on the life experiences of its membes to foster nurturing, support, and transformation through a "circle of sharing." Groups create more positive and less stigmatizing "meaning perspectives" of the members' problems than is available from professionals or lay folk culture.
She provides practical advice and direction to professionals for working with these groups while analyzing self-help/support organizations on three different levels - in terms of the groups themselves, the groups' members, and the practitioner's interaction with the groups. In addition, this comprehensive volume discusses the most prominent representative associations as examples of different types of groups, including Alcoholics Anonymous, Recovery, Inc., National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and the Alzheimer's Association. It also examines the rise of telephone and on-line self-help, considering the advantages, and disadvantages of this style of group interaction.
Self-help organizations across the world, such as Alcoholics Anonymous, Croix D'Or, The Links, Moderation Management, Narcotics Anonymous, and SMART Recovery, have attracted tens of millions of individuals seeking to address addiction problems with drugs or alcohol. This book provides an integrative, international review of research on these organizations, focusing in particular on the critical questions of how they affect individual members and whether self-help groups and formal health care systems can work together to combat substance abuse. Keith Humphreys reviews over 500 studies into the efficacy of self-help groups as an alternative and voluntary form of treatment. In addition to offering a critical review of the international body of research in this area, he provides practical strategies for how individual clinicians and treatment systems can interact with self-help organizations in a way that improves outcomes for patients and for communities as a whole.
Social science research on self-help/mutual aid groups and organizations from 1960 on is reviewed. Voluntary peer-run mutually supportive groups’ diversity illustrated through Alcoholics Anonymous, mental health groups and others. Socio-political contexts shape self-help/mutual aid. Borkman’s autoethnographic narrative highlights her participation.
Here is new information on the development of international and intercultural research on self-help groups. This book reflects the many developments which have occurred in the field over the past decade, emphasizing empirical research. Self-Help and Mutual Aid Groups provides specific research findings and honed concepts to help health professionals learn more about self-help groups and work effectively with such groups. More countries and ethnic groups are now involved in the self-help movement, and this volume increases knowledge of how different cultures react to and participate in self-help mutual aid and how self-help groups can be adapted to fit different racial or ethnic populations. Self-Help and Mutual Aid Groups explores the definition of self-help, the centrality of culture as a major factor explaining variability in self-help, the development of appropriate methodological tools, and the role and involvement of professionals. It brings together different traditions of research for the study of cross- and intercultural and inter- and intraorganizational aspects of self-help groups. Contributors who represent various disciplines, including psychology, sociology, social work, and nursing, discuss: a paradigm for research in self-help the development of self-help groups in Japan, Hong Kong, and the former East Germany the participation of blacks in Alcoholics Anonymous the participation of Mexican Americans in groups for parents of the mentally ill relationships between self-help groups and health professionals predictors of burnout in self-help group leaders characteristics of effective groups ways individuals change their world view through self-help participationSelf-Help and Mutual Aid Groups is an informative and helpful resource for self-help researchers and teachers, students, and professionals who want to be more effective in their work with self-help groups across cultural and national lines.
This book examines the institutionalization of self-help in the United States using organizational and social movement theories. Looking at a fifty-year period, Archibald charts the formation and dissolution of over 500 medical, academic, and popular organizations. He explores the ways in which the marginal practices of sufferers of chronic conditions like Parkinson's or alcoholism became the common solution for all manner of medical, behavioural, and psychological problems.
Samuel Beckett as a guru for business executives? James Joyce as a guide to living a good life? The notion of notoriously experimental authors sharing a shelf with self-help books might seem far-fetched, yet a hidden history of rivalry, influence, and imitation links these two worlds. In The Self-Help Compulsion, Beth Blum reveals the profound entanglement of modern literature and commercial advice from the late nineteenth century to the present day. Blum explores popular reading practices in which people turn to literature in search of practical advice alongside modern writers’ rebukes of such instrumental purposes. As literary authors positioned themselves in opposition to people like Samuel Smiles and Dale Carnegie, readers turned to self-help for the promises of mobility, agency, and practical use that serious literature was reluctant to supply. Blum unearths a series of unlikely cases of the love-hate relationship between serious fiction and commercial advice, from Gustave Flaubert’s mockery of early DIY culture to Dear Abby’s cutting diagnoses of Nathanael West and from Virginia Woolf’s ambivalent polemics against self-improvement to the ways that contemporary global authors such as Mohsin Hamid and Tash Aw explicitly draw on the self-help genre. She also traces the self-help industry’s tendency to popularize, quote, and adapt literary wisdom and considers what it might have to teach today’s university. Offering a new history of self-help’s origins, appeal, and cultural and literary import around the world, this book reveals that self-help’s most valuable secrets are not about getting rich or winning friends but about how and why people read.
