The therapeutic handling of a mental health promotion group: The therapist role in the Communitarian Mental Health Group

Abstract

Within the mental health promotion field, communitarian and group-based interventions are significant and viable approaches. One of the features of group studies is the therapeutic group handling, provided by the group therapist, which influences the therapeutic potential and development of the group. The communitarian Mental Health Group (CMHG) is an innovative intervention for promoting mental health, developed and researched for 18 years, in Brazil. The activity's goal is to promote the attitudes of attention and understanding over day-by-day experiences, as resources of mental health promotion. This research goal was to investigate and understand the therapeutic group handling provided by the CMHG's therapist and its connections to this specific group's characteristics. The corpus was built by the transcriptions of six groups. To each group session, all the therapist's interventions were analyzed in the context in which they happened. Later, those sessions were horizontally analyzed, as a mean to identify common aspects of the CMHG's therapeutic handling, which resulted in the elaboration of three main categories: framing–includes interventions which the therapist organizes the setting; providing keys–includes interventions which the therapist provides key concepts and encourages the participants to adopt certain attitudes, so that they can understand and interact with the assignment; Understanding the gesture–includes the interventions which the therapist stresses the gestures underlying the participant's communication. This research pointed that the therapeutic handling of CMHG is different from traditional models, and that it is related to its theoretical and methodological approach.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.