Empowering depressed women: Changes in ‘individual’ and ‘social’ feelings in guided self-help groups in Finland

Abstract

The Women and Depression Project began in 1994 within a Finnish national research programme. We developed professionally guided self-help groups as a therapeutic intervention in mental health clinics. Through a gender lens, we explored the effect of group participation on depressed women's ‘individual’ and ‘social’ feelings over three time periods. The central research question was: were there significant changes in members’ individual and social feelings between these time periods? Using an innovative, culturally sensitive measurement tool, we measured these changes. We analysed quantitative data from the feelings questions on Questionnaires 1, 2 and 3 and qualitative data from the question, ‘How has the group helped you to create changes in your life?’. We applied the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-ranks z-test to the quantitative data to assess statistically between the time periods. Responses to the open-ended question generated qualitative data that were mainly descriptive, an important contribution considering the paucity of information on depressed women. Our findings advance, albeit in a small way, an understanding of how women accepted managed or healed their depression as they broke down the public and private boundaries of their emotional lives. Members became empowered to understand themselves and believe in their potential as social individuals through their participation in the group. In the long term, they altered their feelings and relationships to themselves and their environment.

Keywords:

• Depression and women
• self-help groups
• empowerment

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank all the women in the study for their hard work and commitment to the research and groups. Also, we would like to thank Barbara Katz Rothman of City University of New York and Linda Morrison of Oakland University for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. A special thank you goes to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions in the review process and Dr Colleen Heenan and Rhiannon Thomas for their professional guidance when this paper was being reviewed.