Self-help clearing-houses in North America: a survey of their structural characteristics and community health implications.

Self-help groups hold the potential for helping many people adjust to health difficulties and life stresses. Self-help clearing-houses represent a community-centred approach to developing and realizing this potential. Several papers describing specific clearing-houses have been published, but a comprehensive survey of these organizations has not yet been completed. This article reports the results of such a survey, in which a majority of existing North American clearing-houses participated. Clearing-houses were found to have evolved rapidly in the last ten years, to the point that they now provide an array of informational, educational, and consultative services to catchment areas that contain over 70 million people. Although clearing-houses offer a unique perspective on the self-help movement and may make important contributions to physical and mental health, they also face technical, philosophical, and funding issues. Considering their tenacity and the robust rate at which they are being established, however, it seems likely that these and other problems will be solved, and that clearing-houses will become an established feature of the human services landscape.