Professional Roles in a Self-Help Group for the Bereaved

Abstract

Self-help groups are a relatively new and very useful aid to the bereaved. The movement does for the bereaved what the development of the hospice did for the dying a few years ago, in that it creates community, puts the locus of control on the individual, and emphasizes interaction and growth. Some of the literature on self-help groups raises the question of the role of professionals in the self-help group since such groups are different from, at some points antithetical to, and in practice occasionally resistant to professional intervention. This paper grew out of our experience with a local chapter of the Compassionate Friends, a group of bereaved parents. It is an attempt to show how professionals can work within the self-help movement despite the gap between the self-help ideology and our own. We have sketched five areas in our work which seem to have been useful to our TCF chapter: 1) intermediary between the group and the professional community; 2) articulating the group's ideology to the group itself; 3) resource person in program planning; 4) facilitator of group processes and organization; and 5) research. This paper also explores the topic of referral to professionals for parents in acute grief expressing itself in psychotomimetic behavior.