Self-Help Groups: An Agency's Experience

SELF-HELP GROUPS have a long history; people have gathered informally to assist one another for centuries. Social workers have been actively involved with community self-help groups of various kinds since the development of the profession in the nineteenth century. I In recent years the numbers of identified self-help groups have grown dramatically.s Currently, these groups focus more on immediate, personal issues and less on broader social and economic problems than they did in the past. Nonetheless, contemporary groups are also influenced by general social changes. 3 Today, there are groups for families of mental patients, people with chronic ailments, people undergoing transitional crises, women in abusive relationships, and employees experiencing work stresses, to name a few." The present article describes a large family service agency's experiences with two self-help groups over a period of two years. Data from a