Helping Themselves : With Fine-Tuning, Support Groups Draw More Minorities

For Barbara Ibarra, the Mother’s Club was a perfect place to share her frustrations of caring for young children.

Once a week, after dropping off her oldest child at a Head Start preschool class, the La Puente mother met with other young Latina mothers in a room across the hall from their children.

They talked about their families, finances, their own feelings of isolation and loneliness. The meeting was free. It was anonymous. It was convenient. Some of the women, forbidden to participate in any activities outside the home, didn’t dare tell their husbands.

“To me, it was a place to get together with other moms and see that children all go through stages, and that I’m not the only one going through it,” Ibarra recalls. “For many of the mothers, being at home tends to make them feel overworked and under-appreciated and ready to explode.”

But the Mothers Club--sponsored by the California Self-Help Center at UCLA--is more than that. It is part of a burgeoning movement to attract minorities to the hugely popular--but largely white--American self-help movement.

An estimated 15 million Americans participate in about 500,000 self-help groups. Also called support groups, or mutual help groups, the meetings range from the granddaddy of self-help, Alcoholics Anonymous, to groups for arthritis, phobias, mental illness, gambling or drug addiction and coping with troubled children.

But one major flaw, historically, has been the lack of participation by ethnic and racial minority groups, experts say.

“The phenomenon isn’t practiced in minority communities with the same frequency and with the same confidence that it is in other communities,” says Frances Dory, executive director of the California Self-Help Center based at UCLA.

That is beginning to change, however, as problems related to addiction, gang activity and AIDS overburden inner-city areas while government and social services dry up. And experts say the self-help movement in minority communities is taking a slightly different format than the one established in the mid-1930s by Alcoholics Anonymous:

* Instead of addressing one major problem, such as cocaine addiction, self-help groups in minority communities often encompass overlapping problems such as addictions, poverty and social isolation.

* The groups’ success often depends on an environment with group leaders who have the same background as participants.

* The groups often spawn advocacy efforts to focus more attention on the particular needs of various minorities.

The failure of the self-help movement to take hold in minority communities has been blamed on such factors as language barriers, lack of access and cultural taboos against sharing problems outside the family. But many observers say the time is right for support groups to catch fire in minority communities.

In working with troubled teen-agers and young adults, says Shirley Adams, director of the Pasadena-Foothill Branch of the Los Angeles Urban League, “I see them reaching out for a lifeline.”

Adams is seeking funding to establish self-help groups for young men of color in the Pasadena area.

“I think this tool will work,” she says. “Even if I didn’t, I’d be afraid not to try it.”

With a scarcity of counselors and money to provide individual counseling for all troubled youths, Adams sees self-help groups as a way to fill in some social-service gaps. Besides, she says, studies and pilot programs indicate that self-help works.

“As adults, we feel better when we know that we are not standing alone,” she says. “Through self-help, these kids can come together and talk about themselves.”

Minorities are discovering that self-help groups can give them confidence to deal with their problems--the hallmark of a successful self-help philosophy, says Frank Riessman, director of the National Self-Help Clearinghouse.

“Self-help is very empowering,” says Riessman, who recently attended a workshop for planners of Alcoholics Anonymous groups in New York City that drew 4,000 participants--mostly minorities. “It gives people a chance to make a difference at the immediate level. It has an influence on someone’s own life.”

But there are other reasons the self-help movement is now increasing its hold among all American cultures and ethnic groups.

Riessman suggests that Americans have become somewhat skeptical of expert or professional advice and now seek more personal assistance: “There is a spiritual gap in society. Self-help is an ethical movement, spiritual in the sense of caring for other people.”

And, says Dory, many Americans have found that professional treatment for an addiction or emotional or physical problem is not enough to help regain control of their lives. Professionals, they find, don’t have all the answers.

“What is still missing is the interaction, the working through it, the struggling,” she says. “That was the way things used to be; that you share problems with family and close friends. But we got away from that.”

The trend of moving from one’s families and hometowns and becoming isolated as strangers in a new place is common in minority neighborhoods, many of which are populated with immigrants, Riessman says.

“People are moving a great deal and have lost their roots,” he says. “(Self-help groups) are a way to make friends and become close to people very fast. There is a lack of community in our country today. Self-help is a kind of community.”

While there are few formal studies of self-help effects on any groups, much less on minorities, some research attests to the general impact.

One study found that women with metastasized breast cancer who participated in a weekly 90-minute support group for one year survived 1 1/2 years longer on average than comparable women who received medical treatment only.

In another study, male and female smokers who participated in a smoking cessation program along with a support group had higher quit rates than people who took part only in the stop smoking program.

And parents who joined self-help groups reported in one survey that they felt more confident and less alone in caring for young children, and that their parental skills had improved.

“The rules of self-help--the common agenda, the confidentiality, the building of trust--give people tools to help themselves,” Adams says.

Still, some barriers block the growth of self-help groups in minority communities.

Ibarra, who has become a group facilitator for the Mother’s Club in La Puente, says she calls the other mothers the day before meetings to remind, and urge, them to attend.

“You have to be persistent and let them know it’s for their own good and not for your own good,” she says. “This is just not a custom for them.”

At Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, Dr. Keh-Ming Lin is studying how to make both psychiatric treatment programs and self-help group activities more culturally acceptable to Latino patients and their families. According to Lin, Latino patients and their families rarely use self-help and patient-family support groups such as those offered by the California Alliance for the Mentally Ill.

“We need to find out what their ideas and perceptions are,” he says. “We need to know the reasons that make them reluctant to come to the groups.

“We don’t know whether they are reluctant or whether the groups we have now are more Anglo-oriented. The way the groups operate or are organized may not be conducive to including people from other backgrounds.”

Some experts suggest that self-help is an Anglo-American tradition that has not been practiced in other countries and is simply foreign to some ethnic groups. Other ethnic groups might rely on family members to provide support.

But Riessman downplays the role tradition and culture have in preventing minorities from participating in self-help.

“That cultural (explanation) bothers me,” he says. “When the need becomes apparent, the cultural barriers break down.”

Others suggest that self-help groups would flourish in minority communities if group facilitators were members of the community who knew how to create a comfortable environment and spoke the same language as participants.

“We find that you tend to listen more (to a person of same background),” says Gerald Ludd, of the Minority AIDS Project in Los Angeles. “When you have someone from another ethnic background coming in and telling you things, you’re not quite as at ease anymore. It’s hard for black people who have been so oppressed for so many years and manipulated by white society to come and hear someone say ‘AIDS is not a white disease. This attacks all colors.’ They would rather have someone of their own color speak to them.”

And while it is often not easy for people of any color to admit problems and share feelings with strangers, it might be especially acute among minorities, Dory says:

“I think that it’s very hard for people who feel marginalized in society to admit problems in which there is tremendous shame or guilt or fear.”

And says Ibarra: “I know a lot of agencies want to help people, but a lot of people are afraid to ask for help or think they can work it out themselves. Certain problems they don’t want to expose.

“But I feel like I’m friends with the moms now. And they’ll say, ‘Oh what the heck, I’ll just tell you.’ And they tell me. They know the groups have confidentiality.”

Some minority groups, however, fear that the creation of self-help groups will provide governments with new reasons to cut back social-service funds, Dory says:

“There is a huge political issue of advocating self-help at a time when there are government cutbacks. We’re saying you can’t rely on just the kind of support you’re getting from government. If we’re going to resolve these issues, each of us is going to have to take some responsibility.”

Nationally, however, self-help groups are becoming increasingly politically active.

“We find that once people come out and accept their problem they become activists,” Ludd says.

Strength in Numbers

What is self-help?

Self-help groups unite people with common concerns so that they may help each other cope more effectively through the exchange of psychological support, information and resources.The groups can be for:

* Physical or mental illness.

* Reforming addictive behavior.

* Coping with a crisis or a transition.

* “One step beyond” groups for friends or relatives of the person with the problem.