Support Groups

Overview

Support groups offer the opportunity for people to meet and share information about their experiences with MVPS. It is a place where you can speak freely about your feelings -- and know that others there have no doubt had the same feelings at some point. Support groups provide a means of relating strategies for improving your quality of life, and to give others that may have just been diagnosed your expertise and encouragement in dealing with this sometimes frightening condition.

The facts

You do not need to have experience in managing a support group in order to start one yourself. You do not need to be a health professional to start one, either. You also don't necessarily have to have a lot of extra time or money on your hands in order to make a significant contribution to your community. What you do need to have is ample motivation to help you make the first step towards helping others. You need to have an insatiable hunger for knowledge and information where MVPS is concerned. You also need to be willing to give of yourself, both physically and psychologically.

Once you've made the final decision to start up your own support group, you can use these suggestions to make it easier:

• Join a workshop class in starting support groups (contact your local Mental Health Clearing House for availability)
• Booklets (provided by the workshops)
• Educational materials from the National MVP Society in Birmingham, AL (they offer books, videos on many topics related to MVP, and newsletters)
• Speak to someone who has already done it (you can contact MVP centers for locations of other MVP support groups) and get their view and advice
• Subscribe to the MVP newsletters to help you gather as much information as possible.
• Contact your medical resources (such as cardiologist/nurse and local hospitals) for their advice.

Get started

Once you've done the research, here are the specific things to do to begin a support group:

1. Choose a central location for your initial organizational meeting. Hospitals and churches are ideal because their meeting rooms and auditoriums are usually free.
2. Advertise. Post notices of the meetings in interested physician's offices, do public service announcements on the radio, and send announcements to your newspaper's health section.
3. At your first meeting, have a brain-storming session to think of possible topics and speakers.
4. You should also use this meeting to decide how often you will meet, and to set guidelines as to phone calls to the leader and other members for discussions, etc. If it will be a large group you might want to set up a buddy system where willing participants include their names and phone numbers on a list to be circulated at meetings.
5. Xerox articles and newsletters released on MVP for members to read, or to take out on loan.
6. Provide MVP books for purchase, or at least provide the names of books and their publishers so the members can find the books themselves.
7. Try to plan your meetings so as to avoid all-out gripe sessions. Everyone has had negative experiences, but it's more important to relay what has helped rather than the negatives.

The content of your meetings is up to you and your group's members. You can alternate between having guest speakers and simply having group discussions, or you can choose to only have one or the other. Each group will be unique and should address the specific needs of that group as a whole.

Summary

To start a support group, you must be passionate about it. It can take a lot of time in some cases and be draining at times too. You're making a wonderful commitment -- to yourself and the people you will soon be helping. The whole point of a MVPS support group is to educate ourselves and others about what MVPS is and to guide them to find positive ways of learning to deal with it. It can be a tremendous learning experience.