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.

Volume numbers determined from Scope of the guidelines, p. 12-13.

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.