Mental health articles

Setting up a support group Support groups are not easy to get going. They need, first and foremost, a group of people who are interested and committed to the idea. Not everyone is interested in support groups. Some people are not comfortable sharing personal feelings. They may not see the point of regularly meeting others with a similar problem. You can play three important roles in helping set up support groups in your community.

Setting up a support group for mental health • Put people who share a common problem in touch with one another. Many families facing a mental health problem are embarrassed and keep it quiet from others. You may know of a number of families in the community with, say, a mentally retarded child. You could introduce one family to another and thus help in setting up an informal, small support group. It is important that you discuss this with each family before informing any outsider about their problem. Another way of bringing people together is putting up information on the proposed group in a public place, for example a poster in the health centre. You can fix a meeting and simply tell all the people who may be eligible to participate in the group to attend that meeting to find out more about the group.

• Help provide a space for meetings. Ideally, support groups should meet in the homes of the members. However, this may not always be possible. In these situations, you may be able to offer a room in the clinic during hours when it is not too busy. Members could then meet in a safe place and combine their participation in the support group with a consultation with you if they so wished.

• Facilitate the group. The idea of self-help groups is not familiar to many people. You can play a guiding role in helping getting a group going by participating in the first few meetings.

Tags: Health, mental, Mental health