A 16-year-old teenager suffering from anxiety, a 70-year-old grandmother battling depression and a 26-year-old counselling psychologist looking to make a difference: What do they have in common? They all attend a support group for individuals suffering from common mental disorders (CMDs).
While the idea of support groups has been around for a while, it has largely been popular for individuals dealing with addiction, loss or pain. Groups dealing with CMDs such as anxiety, stress and depression, which make up bulk of the incidence of mental health issues, are relatively fewer in number.
Buoyed by the pandemic, which put a spotlight on mental health and broke some of the taboo associated with such conditions, more such groups have started springing up, according to experts. And while there’s still a long way to go, these groups are quickly becoming invaluable for several people who attend them.
“I chickened out when I first decided to go to a therapist. But support groups offer a safe space for me to speak about my problems, making them even more important,” says Ricky Saldanha, a 25-year-old data analyst who has been suffering from depression and anxiety, and who decided to seek professional help in 2018. “There were times when I would take a month to open a new email, and another month to reply to them. I was not in the right mind space to do so.”
Saldanha, who stays in Thane, Maharashtra, says support groups became more important for him during the pandemic when meeting people in person wasn’t possible.
The concept
A support group, by definition, is a safe space for individuals to share their personal experiences, feelings, strategies to cope, or just information about disorders they suffer from. Each person stands to benefit from a support group, as they come to understand they are not alone in their process of healing.
The concept is backed by science, with a lot of literature borrowed from methodologies for social work. Dr Aarti Jagannathan, an additional professor of psychiatry at Bengaluru’s National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS) who specializes in social work, says there are three phases to a support group.
“If you look at social work literature, group work is one of its core methods,” Dr Jagannathan says. “Group work is an established methodology where the initial phase, middle phase and termination phase of the group helps understand the group process.”
The initial phase focuses on creating a safe space for participants, the middle phase is the longest and during which the actual work of the support group is done, while the termination phase is when the work has been completed and the support group has met its purpose.
Support groups are also divided based on whether they have fixed participation or are ongoing with revolving members. Fixed groups would usually have a smaller number of patients, while revolving membership support groups are more structured and usually a part of inpatient treatment programmes.
Dr Jagannathan says this dictates how the group interacts with each other, who is taking up the leadership role and what the various communication patterns are. “There have been various studies conducted in the past about how support groups can help clients in various ways for different outcomes,” she says.
Participating in a support group would give an individual access to others with similar feelings, problems, treatment methods and side-effects, helping all members understand one another. This lays the basis for listening and sharing experiences, and collectively dealing with issues or finding a solution.
New members may only listen to others in a support group, experts say, and as time progresses, they get more comfortable about sharing their personal experiences with others.
Choosing a support group
Experts also says that when it comes to picking a support group, one shouldn’t be picky, but rather look for a group that deals with the same problem that they are suffering from. Moreover, they say that one should not be narrow-minded when going to a group, and instead should take in whatever comes during the group process.
“All of us have experienced things like stress, joy, grief, fear, anxiety and worry to some degree,” says Medha Saharya, a counselling psychologist who runs a support group ‘Work in Progress’ for people suffering from CMDs. “We might not always have the right words for it, but the problem lies in the fact that we do not have the right coping mechanisms for it. In popular culture, we are often told that if you don’t pay attention to it, you will be fine.”
Finding a safe support group is another question that many would need an answer for. “I get that it is tricky,” Saharya says. “What is important is to see how comfortable you are with the person who is facilitating the support group, with the other people in the support group, paying attention to the ground rules. If you know that participation is compulsory, then that defeats the point of a support group. No mental health therapy should be intimidating.”
Complementary role
According to her, a support group is not a replacement for conventional therapy, and nor can it replace an individual’s familial support system. Instead, attending a support group can be complementary to other methods of aid when suffering from mental health or other disorders, working on the principle of shared grief, and knowing one is not alone
“Therapists can direct a person to a support group,” says Saharya. “But otherwise, it is also possible to find support groups on the internet. I don’t hesitate to refer people to a support group. Finding support groups by doing research on Google, and finding a trusted source is also a good way to go about it.”
Technology today is helping alleviate some of the troubles of finding a support group. Moving support groups online was natural during the pandemic, but this trend has stayed. Now people can seek mental health support from any corner of the world and join groups that discuss their mental health disorders even if there are none near them.
Services have also cropped up that seek to collate support groups both online and offline, to aid discoverability. Another way moving online has improved accessibility to support groups is that there’s now an abundance of free options for individuals suffering from CMDs.
“For addressing individual goals, an ideal combination is to access both,” says Saharya.
“There is something different when you go for a one-on-one sitting with a mental health professional who has designed sessions to talk about what you are experiencing. So, the kind of insight that you are generating when you are working one-on-one with somebody is clearly different. There is a lot of healing, in terms of the difficulties that you are experiencing, and it is a more focused thing, so it goes on for a longer period of time. A one-size-fits-all approach does not work in mental health. Ideally support systems should be complementary to therapy.”
Still, more needs to be dne, says Saharya. While there are several support groups for those grappling with addiction or the loss of a loved one, for those who suffer from common mental health disorders, “there aren’t as many support groups as needed.”
