A battle is often fought together, when you share a common goal and come up with solutions. In this article we highlight how people with shared experiences fight the battle of depression together.
Not everyone can understand what one is going through when they face any stressful life event or have a mental illness.
What does one do in a situation when there is no one to understand how you are feeling, when no one is there to empathize with your pain and hardships, how do you communicate that with someone without feeling like you are a burden on them and they might not understand.
Support groups can be of great help in such a state of affairs.
Support groups are a safe space for people who are going through or have gone through similar phases and experiences. Support groups bring together individuals who want to share their experiences regarding specific issues where they can find appropriate knowledge, advice and seek emotional support together.
Need for support groups:
Depression and seeking help from someone is often seen as disapproving and is largely stigmatized. Hence a lot of times a considerable group of people with depression do not look for professional help, and those who do may find that their demands and needs are not met even in formal settings particularly because they might not get enough emotional support. Hence support groups act as a bridge for people who seek medical guidance and want their emotional needs met.
Types
There are two types of support groups:
Self-Help Support groups: While watching a lot of TV series you might have heard of groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous in which individuals who are subjected to substance abuse share their experiences together. Similarly as the name suggests, they are mostly managed by its own members who volunteer and go through similar experiences.
Professionally Operated Support groups: Here, the support group activities are facilitated by a trained professional who is mostly someone not going through the same conditions and does not share the same issue as its members. The professional acts as a guide and encourages their members to get better.
Benefits of support groups:
When you are a member of a support group, you provide your fellow members with an ample amount of assistance which is usually nonprofessional, usually characteristic and a shared issue, here depression. Members with the same issues can come together to:
Share strategies which can help cope from those issues such professional guidance, who to seek formal advice from.
While talking about your circumstances with your friends or family members can be burdensome, you do not feel like that in a support group. Instead you feel a sense of empowerment and have a sense of belongingness.
If it is a professional operated support group, the help can provide and evaluate pertinent information.
In a support group you can associate with other people’s personal experiences, hear out to and accept others' experiences, provide comfort and encourage each other.
You can also form social networks for the same.
You can also increase awareness of the particular issue among other people and work for the cause.
If it is an online support group, it can be anonymous and people who are anxious and cannot share their identity can remain anonymous.
One can also learn about economic and financial resources.
What EduPsych’s “You can talk about Depression Support Group" has to offer?
As we all know that depression isn’t just feeling gloomy, sorrowful or dejected but rather it screams biology and has a lot of underlying neurological triggers that one might not even be aware of. The group is led by a facilitator who can help build your awareness around the triggers that might be emotional and behaviours that can focus your attention on what might be the reasons you might be feeling this way. Everyone’s way of coping from depression varies, so when you become a member of our support group you’ll be able to have developed your own toolkit that will help with your battle against depression. You will have developed a set of habits that will help you stay grounded if there is a relapse and you feel depressed again.
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