Mutual Support and Mental Health: A Route to Recovery

Citation

Watkins, D. (2013), "Mutual Support and Mental Health: A Route to Recovery", Therapeutic Communities: The International Journal of Therapeutic Communities, Vol. 34 No. 1, pp. 55-56. https://doi.org/10.1108/09641861311330527

Shifting the discourse in mental health towards recovery concepts has put hope, meaning and the validation of individual narrative back at the heart of service provision. People are encouraged to share the experience of recovery for the benefit of self and others. However, a lack of theoretical and structural consistency means that for many, the experience of emotional distress and mental disorder remains isolating, excluding and debilitating. Maddy Loat's particular route through this discourse explores mutual support as a way of validating shared, as well as individual experience to reduce isolation, ease distress and enhance health and wellbeing. This volume, in the Community, Culture and Change series, links social and therapeutic models, proposing fellowship and emotional support as evidence‐based recovery pathways.

Maddy Loat writes from her dual perspectives of clinical experience and research to produce a volume which reviews the evidence for mutual support in the context of a commitment to provide structures which alleviate distress and improve lives. The growth and diversification of mutual support groups and the research focus is analysed and practical, useful guidance is provided on how to access, set up and facilitate mutual support groups. Most ambitiously, this book links diverse theoretical frameworks from developmental psychology (Bowlby, Erikson), group psychotherapy (Foulkes, Bion) and therapeutic communities under a social banner. This is concluded in a convincing argument for mutual support as a developmental and evolutionary necessity for human psychological and social wellbeing.

The comprehensive review of mutual support research is supported by a detailed historical review of the inception and function of both mutual support groups and therapeutic communities. In this way, this book challenges some traditional models of explanation in mental health and develops a new understanding of the potential for therapeutic community principles to be applied in contemporary service provision. Her final chapter proposes a cultural and political shift in the power relations and working models of mental health to develop effective social and interactive pathways.