History, Concept and Position of Self-Help Groups in Germany

Abstract

Those responsible for medical care only reluctantly concede the true existence of the duality between highly technical medical support and compassionate medical support. The latter does not receive its fair share of attention. In view of the tremendous expansion of technological quick-fix medicine - driven in part by the demands of patients themselves - the situation will not change. This huge deficit of modem medicine led to the growth of self-help groups. The maxim of self-help groups in the United States - `Doctors know better than we do how a sickness can be treated. We know better than doctors how sick people can be treated as humans' - expresses in a nutshell, the complementary relationship between self-help groups and medical care. The author's twenty-five years of practical experience in furthering the self-help movement and its work are the background for outlining the development of group self-help, and the current threat of resistance to the dynamic potential of self-help groups. Furthermore, it makes it possible to describe a time-tested model for cooperation between self-help groups and their professional support workers that augments the autonomous group meetings primarily with a so-called general meeting. This mobilizes self-development without leading to new dependencies. The future of medicine and presumably also of psychotherapy is no longer imaginable without dynamic self-help groups.