Group Therapy Programs for Mental Health

Abstract

Introduction: Our 9-week Participatory Community Project focused on the Emerge group program offered by Sonder to provide support for young people with complex mental health difficulties. The Emerge group program is currently offered at 3 locations, with the South site experiencing the lowest levels of attendance and engagement. Therefore, our project was based at the South site location with the goal of applying project findings across all sites.

Objectives: The project aim was to “To increase engagement and attendance of young people with mental health challenges who are accessing Sonders Emerge Program to facilitate improved mental health and wellbeing outcomes”.

Discussion and Outcomes: The views of stakeholders were gathered through activities including participating in staff meetings and group programs, phone calls with young people, evaluation forms, zoom call meetings and surveys. The findings from these activities were collated and summarised into common themes. This highlighted to project facilitators the need for increased promotion of the group, thus, resulted in the production of a promotional video exhibiting the Emerge group program activities on offer. A common finding was the need for young people to be involved in decision making to engage the young audience, therefore, young people were directly involved in creating the video. Dissemination of the promotional video in the community will work to raise awareness and assist stakeholders to overcome the barriers restricting the attendance of young people in the Emerge group program.  It was also found that a strong occupational focus in group programs is important to provide young people with direct opportunity to improve their occupational performance and ability to participate in everyday activities to enhance wellbeing.

Conclusion: This project concluded that increasing young people’s involvement in group planning and decision making, running groups in a more communal area, implementing an occupational focus for group activities and a flow chart for clinicians to follow when referring young people into the group program, will improve the attendance and engagement of young people. The project related to the theme of “Millions of PossibilOTs” because it aimed to increase the opportunities for young people to be involved in decision making for their own health and wellbeing.

Implications: An instrumental community development approach guided the project formation to promote sustainability of the long-term project outcomes. The findings from this project will act to promote the inclusion and leadership of young people in their future health and wellbeing.