Studies in the United States have shown that community-based organisations like GROW can achieve more in the treatment of mental health problems than professional care, a conference on mental health has heard.
Delivering the keynote address yesterday in Cork to the 10th annual conference of GROW - the community health movement - Dr Julian Rappaport, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, said two separate studies in Illinois had proved scientifically that self-help, community-based initiatives in mental health could be more effective and cheaper than conventional treatment.
In the most recent study, at Yale University by Prof Bret Kloos, two groups of mental health sufferers with serious conditions including schizophrenia and depression were tracked.
Each group was receiving excellent care, one in a facility run by professionals, the other within a GROW community. Prof Rappaport said that those who had received help through the GROW community had developed a far more confident and optimistic view of their future than the sufferers who received professional care.
This was not to say that standards of professional care were below par, he added, merely that the GROW approach was achieving results not attainable by conventional means.
"Every member of the staff in the GROW communities in the study had been through the system themselves when suffering from some form of mental health problem," Prof Rappaport said.
"Now they were in the role of facilitators and helpers, offering advice to new people and giving them the benefit of their own insights.
"Having suffered themselves, they were in a unique position to help and by doing so, their self-esteem improved, they found a real purpose in life and felt they had something to contribute. They gained a new hope and confidence," he said.
"The lesson is that medication on its own is not enough, care must be administered in a community setting if the results we found are to be achieved."