The National Self-Help Clearinghouse is a program of the C.A.S.E. and the City University of New York Graduate Center
Frank Riessman and Audrey Gartner, Co-Directors
Summer 2000 Issue
The New Self-Help Health Agenda
Hearings in Congress on Self-Care
The New York Times reported on hearings in Congress from June 28-29 to consider making more prescription medications available over the counter and online. Dr. Robert De Lap, who arranged the hearings, said: "The health care environment has changed tremendously. People are much more interested in self-care, and in being able to manage their minor conditions themselves." Go to Article...
With the rise of managed care why haven't self-help groups become an integral part of the health system? Self-help mutual aid groups for health related problems have been getting quite a bit of attention lately. Such groups have long existed for a wide variety of conditions, from organizations like GROW for mental health to groups for Parkinsons, Multiple Sclorosis and other chronic illnesses. The online revolution has only energized this trend, as the directories on America Online and other websites (see below) will attest. In fact, a mutual aid group exists for every condition identified by the World Health organization.
With the advent of managed care, one might have thought that self-help groups would become an integrated part of the health care system, especially because research has shown that group participation impacts health most favorably....Go to Article...
Two Major Articles on Health Related Self Help Groups
The American Psychologist (February 2000) recently ran a lead article on self-help entitled, "Who Talks? The Social Psychology of Illness Support Groups" by Kathryn P. Davidson, James W. Pennebaker, and Sally S. Dickerson. Using a painstaking and innovative method of meticulously counting group by group, the authors studied participation in health related mutual aid, including online, in four major U.S. cities--over 14,000 groups in all. A groundbreaking feature of the article is its call for greater collaboration between the provider and support groups as an effective but underutilized health resource...
An important paper by Greg Meissen, Scott Wituk, Mary L. Warren and Matthew D. Shepherd, "Self-Help Groups and Managed Health Care" documents issues in making self-help groups for illness part of the continuum of treatment by managed care and mental health delivery organizations. These include the concerns of self-help support groups and health care organizations. The Self-Help Network of Kansas, of which Dr. Meissen is the director, made several efforts to integrate its services with health organizations, with some success...
Book Reviews
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam 541 pp. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. Robert Putnam, who in his 1995 article,"Bowling Alone," descried a drop in joining groups, voting and volunteerism in the United States, is back. Reviewed by Erik Banks
Understanding Self-Help Mutual Aid: Experiential Learning in the Commons by Thomasina Borkman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). Reviewed by Frank Riessman
International Journal of Self-Help and Self-Care edited by Alfred Katz (UCLA), Associate Editor Keith Humphreys (Stanford). Go to Articles...
Participation Controlled Self-Help Research: A Proposal
In our last newsletter Frank Riessman and I examined some difficulties of self-help research. Among these are the fact that groups studied by researchers have to conform to the rigors of the controlled experiment. Members have to be randomly assigned to a controlled group or to the self-help group. Now although studies of this kind have been positive, critics say that throwing individuals randomly into a group alters the self-determined, self-selected nature of groups and falsifies the phenomenon of natural mutual aid. But without random assignment there is no way to tell whether members would have benefited on their own without the group. However, according to Hazelden, the effectiveness of court-ordered groups for alcoholism is comparable to self-selected groups.Go to Article...
Links for Consumers and Professionals
Reviews of five current websites featuring online self-help groups, chats for consumers and professionals, self-care advice and resources.
National Self-Help Clearinghouse