Self-Help: Concepts and Applications

Abstract

Passing by an urban playground one may see knots of young mothers on park benches absorbed in conversations about when to start feeding orange juice and where to find a babysitter for the return to work. Other new mothers become a source of solace, friendship, and information, and of outgrown baby clothes. Self-help groups are probably as old as the human race, from hunting parties to barn raisings, but in the 1980s organized self-help groups became more open and legitimated in US culture. As indicated in a recent<i>New York Times</i>article ("O.K. on the Self-Realization; What About the Economy?" by Maureen Dowd, July 27, 1992, p Al), the Democratic party convention brought a whole new self-help flavor to political discourse, in sharp contrast to 1972 when Senator Thomas Eagleton was deemed unfit for vice-presidential candidacy when it was revealed that he had once been treated with electroconvulsive therapy for