Support Group Experience Assignment/Paper
Written Assignments
A. Support Group Experience Assignment/Paper
Purpose: Support groups are a place for people to give and receive both emotional and practical support as well as to exchange information. The purpose of this assignment is to help the student understand and evaluate group dynamics, group facilitation, and group processing.
Assignment: The student will participate in an observational Support Group Experience. This experience usually lasts 1½ – 2 hours. Choose a Support Group that meets the course
objectives, (i.e., Caregiver group, NAMI-National Alliance for the Mentally Ill support groups, Compassionate Friends-Grief support groups, Family-Survivors of Suicide support groups, cancer support groups). Each student is responsible for contacting the selected
facilities/agencies and arranging the participant-observer experience.
Call the Group Leader to obtain permission to attend. [Be professional and state that you are an advanced practice psychiatric mental health nursing student wishing to gain knowledge about the group and that this is a course assignment.] Maintain professional appearance and behavior while in groups – remember you are a guest and represent your Nursing program.
Write a 4 – 5 page (excluding title page and reference pages) paper on this experience. Follow the following criteria:
Subheadings
• Discuss the purpose of the support group attended.
• Describe the demographics of the group (e.g., number of members in attendance, gender, ages)
• Discuss the roles of the support group leader in relation to the group members.
• Identify the therapeutic factors (Yalom, 2005) you observed in the group. Give an example of each factor identified.
• Discuss your observations about the needs of the group.
• Describe your feelings about this experience and how it personally enriched you.
