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Consumer Activism In Two Women's Self-Help Groups

Self-help groups, also known as mutual help or support groups, are small groups of peers who gather for mutual support to resolve or cope with a common problem, condition, or experience. They involve nonhierarchical face-to-face interaction and depend on personal participation by all members who, perceiving that their needs are not being met through existing social institutions, engage in activities designed to meet those needs. An underlying premise is that a person can best be helped by another who has been through or is currently experiencing a similar situation. Although well-known self-help groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous have existed in the United States since the 1930s, there has been an upsurge in both number and new types of these groups in the past decade. There are now more than 500,000 self-help groups estimated in this country. Gartner and Reissman (1977) attribute this growth to a need for the expansion and revitalization of human services, a breakdown of traditional authority and institutions, and a need for services that, in the past, were performed by family, church, and neighborhood. The self-help movement has been powerfully affected by such values of the sixties as concern for personal autonomy, human potential, and quality of life, as well as by deprofessionalization and consumer rights. These values have also stimulated in health care a rapidly growing emphasis on self-care, based on the notion that the consumer can and should assume more responsibility for his own health (Yeager 1977). Caplan (1974) distinguishes between self-help groups organized to help their members cope with a long-term problem, such as a chronic