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 well-being.
Self-help groups for mental health provide mutual support and peer support. Mutual support is a process by which people voluntarily come together to help each other address common problems. Peer support is social, emotional or instrumental support that is mutually offered or provided by persons with similar mental health conditions where there is some mutual agreement on what is helpful.
Self-help groups are subsets of mutual support and peer support groups, and have a specific purpose for mutual aid in satisfying a common need, overcoming a shared handicap or life-disrupting problem. Self-help groups are less bureaucratic and work on a more grassroots level.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-help_groups_for_mental_health)
We, at Mind Care Clinic constantly strive to engage our patients in such Groups. We encourage them to develop their core groups and hold regular camps for patients to interact with each other and mutually find solutions to their problems.
We are happy to now have this platform where patients can sign-up and create a Group under various categories and then invite others with similar issues to join the group. We are providing tools here where the person creating a certain group can invite others by way of E-mails, Social media e.g. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.
Once they have a minimum number of participants, they can then start conversations and meet in the sessions on a regular basis.
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 well-being.
