Chronically Ill: An Overview of Social Support Groups

Social support groups are a resource for the chronically ill. They are available for many patients with chronic illnesses, which include stroke patients, patients recovering from myocardial infarction, and cancer patients. Some of them are initiated by a therapist, and in some cases they are patient-led.
Support groups may encourage adherence for several reasons:

1. People must commit themselves to change their behavior in front of other individuals. Commitment to a decisional course can frequently improve adherence.

2. In the course of interacting with others, people may also learn techniques that others have used successfully to maintain adherence and adopt them to combat their own problems.

3. The emotional support and encouragement that others with similar problems can also encourage adherence.

Participation in social support group may even promote better health and long-term survival. One study of patients in a weekly cancer support group found that participations survived longer than nonparticipant.

Although widely heralded as a low-cost, convenient treatment option for people to deal with a wide variety of problems, self help groups currently reach only a small proportion of chronically ill patients. Moreover, they appear to appeal disproportionately to well-educated, middle-class white women. Not only is this segment of the population that is already served by traditional treatment services, but these participants in self-help groups may actually be the same individuals who use helping services of all kinds. The potential for self-help groups to be a general resource for the chronically ill then has yet to be fully realized.

Several psychotherapeutic interventions are available to chronically ill patients who are trying to cope with complex problems. These interventions include crisis intervention, family therapy, individual distinctive feature and benefits, and different options may be better suited to some problems than others. Evaluations of these kinds of interventions suggests consistent beneficial effects.

Despite these advances in care for the chronically ill and our expanded understanding of the psychosocial issues that the chronically ill face, medical and psychosocial care for the chronically ill is still irregular, as the burden on caregivers clearly attest. Consequently, managed care may need to assume responsibility for broader based behavioral and psychological approached to improving health among the chronically ill. Physicians and other health practitioner need better raining in behavioral and psychosocial approaches to chronic disorders. Techniques for teaching self-management of chronic illness need to be refined, and educational interventions for communicating them to patients need to be undertake, monitoring the success of programs like these will be important as well.