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3 books match the query 'Self-help groups'

cover of On Our Own, Together: Peer Programs for People with Mental Illness

On Our Own, Together

Peer Programs for People with Mental Illness

Sally Clay

Vanderbilt University Press, 2005

On Our Own, Together describes the inner workings of eight successful peer-run services for mental health consumers, including drop-in centers, educational programs, and peer support/mentoring programs. Written by people who developed such programs, it reveals these services as a valuable resource within the mental health system and a precious necessity for many consumers.

The book clusters the COSPs into three key types: drop-in centers, which provide varied services for their members, including meals, housing assistance, and stigma-free environments; educational programs, which train mental health consumers in recovery skills for themselves and for other consumers; and services based on peer support and mentoring.

Despite their differences, the book shows, the programs share many essential characteristics. Most significantly, they demonstrate the benefits of allowing mental health consumers to operate and govern their own organizations. Also important is their emphasis on equality, mutuality, empowerment, recovery, belonging, and hope in administering services. Such core values, the book suggests, distinguish peer-run programs from the professional services that have long dominated the mental health system.

In contrast to the dry, clinical reports that make up much of the current literature, this book is written "from the inside out" and, for the most part, by the people who developed the programs and who live them every day. It reveals peer-run programs as valuable resources within the mental health system and, indeed, a precious necessity for many consumers.
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cover of Rethinking Therapeutic Culture

Rethinking Therapeutic Culture

Edited by Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Social critics have long lamented America’s descent into a “culture of narcissism,” as Christopher Lasch so lastingly put it fifty years ago. From “first world problems” to political correctness, from the Oprahfication of emotional discourse to the development of Big Pharma products for every real and imagined pathology, therapeutic culture gets the blame. Ask not where the stereotype of feckless, overmedicated, half-paralyzed millennials comes from, for it comes from their parents’ therapist’s couches.
 
Rethinking Therapeutic Culture makes a powerful case that we’ve got it all wrong. Editors Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis bring us a dazzling array of contributors and perspectives to challenge the prevailing view of therapeutic culture as a destructive force that encourages narcissism, insecurity, and social isolation. The collection encourages us to examine what legitimate needs therapeutic practices have served and what unexpected political and social functions they may have performed. Offering both an extended history and a series of critical interventions organized around keywords like pain, privacy, and narcissism, this volume offers a more nuanced, empirically grounded picture of therapeutic culture than the one popularized by critics. Rethinking Therapeutic Culture is a timely book that will change the way we’ve been taught to see the landscape of therapy and self-help.
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cover of Understanding Self-Help/Mutual-Aid: Experiential Learning in the Commons

Understanding Self-Help/Mutual-Aid

Experiential Learning in the Commons

Thomasina Jo Borkman

Rutgers University Press, 1999

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.

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