Mental Health Interventions

Here, 'emotional support' suggests

Directions: Read the passage given below and answer the question that follows by selecting the most appropriate option.
1.       Some researchers suggest that emotional intelligence can be leaned and strengthened, while others claim it is an inborn characteristic. The purpose for developing our emotional literacy is to precisely identify and communicate our feelings. When we do this we are helping nature fulfill its design for our feelings. We must know how we feel in order to be able to fill our emotional needs. And we must communicate our feelings in order to get the emotional support and understanding we need from others, as well as to show our emotional support and understanding to them.
2.         Also, one of the first steps to developing our emotional intelligence is to improve our emotional literacy. In other words, to improve our ability to identify our feelings by their specific names -, and the more specific we can be, the better. In the English language we have thousands of words which describe and identify our emotions, we just don't use many of them. If you are interested in working on your emotional literacy, the first step is to start using simple, three word sentences such as these : I feel sad. I feel motivated. I feel offended. I feel appreciated. I feel hurt. I feel disrespected. When we talk about our feelings using three word sentences we are sending what have been called "I messages". On the other hand, when we say things like ''You make me so jealous" we are sending a "you message". These "you messages" typically put the other person on the defensive, which hurts communication and relationships rather than helping.

What is the underlying principle of self-help groups according to the passage?

Directions: Read the following passage and answer the question that follows.

In Britain in 1970, a Manchester housewife named Katherine Fisher, after suffering from a desperate fear of leaving her own home, founded an organization for others with similar phobias. Today that organization, the Phobics’ Society, has many branches and is one of thousands of new groups cropping up in many of the high-technology nations to help people deal directly with their own problems—psychological, medical, social, or sexual.
In Detroit, some 50 “bereavement groups” have sprung up to aid people suffering from grief after the loss of a relative or friend. In Australia an organization called GROW brings together former mental patients and “nervous persons.” GROW now has chapters in Hawaii, New Zealand, and Ireland. In 22 states an organization called Parents of Gays and Lesbians is formed to help those with homosexual children. In Britain, Depressives Associated has some 60 chapters. From Addicts, Anonymous and the Black Lung Association to Parents Without Partners and Widow-to-Widow, new groups are forming everywhere.
Of course, there is nothing new about people in trouble getting together to talk out their problems and learn from one another. Nonetheless, historians can find little precedent for the wildfire speed with which the self-help movement is spreading today.
These organizations vary widely. Some share the new suspicion of specialists and attempt to work without them. They rely entirely on what might be termed “cross-counselling”—people swapping advice based on their own life experience, as distinct from receiving traditional counselling from the professionals. Some see themselves as providing support system for people in trouble. Others play a political role, lobbying for changes in legislation or tax regulations. Still others have a quasi-religious character. Some are intentional communities whose members not only meet but actually live together.
Such groups are now forming regional, even transnational linkages. To the extent that professional psychologists, social workers, or doctors are involved at all, they increasingly undergo a role change, shifting from the role of impersonal expert who is assumed to know best to that of listener, teacher, and guide who works with the patient or client. Existing voluntary or non-profit groups—originally organized for the purpose of helping others—are similarly struggling to see how they fit in with a movement based on the principle of helping oneself.
The self-help movement is thus restructuring the socio-sphere. Smokers, stutters, suicide-prone people, gamblers, victims of throat disease, parents of twins, overeaters, and other such groupings now form a dense network of organizations that mesh with the emerging Third Wave family and corporate structures.
But whatever their significance for social organization, they represent a basic shift from passive consumer to active prosumer, and they thus hold economic meaning as well. Though ultimately dependent on the market and still intertwined with it, they are transferring activity from Sector B of the economy to Sector A, from the exchange sector to prosumption sector. Nor is this burgeoning movement the only such force. Some of the richest and largest corporations in the world are also—for their own technological and economic reasons—accelerating the rise of the prosumer.