self-help in Germany
In the entire complex of the healthcare industry, self-help has now become a fixed and important element. For many patients, it is an offer without alternative, under the conditions of an often serious or chronic illness, not to be left alone. Self-help is not selfish, but essentially lives from sharing in the problems of other people. The former French President Mitterrand, who himself had cancer and has since died, once put it aptly when he said: "One's own fate is somehow tolerable, that of others is no longer so."
Self-help is the desire for contact, for communication and exchange, for talks at eye level and the knowledge that you are a member of a community of solidarity in which you don't have to explain yourself, because the members of a self-help community know how you are doing. This mutual understanding, giving and taking in fair dialogue, can only be achieved by the patients themselves. This is why the existence of self-help groups is so valuable and so important.
The idea of people helping each other, healthy or sick, is as old as the world and a sign that caring and compassion are human qualities. Finding help yourself through help is not just a play on words, but a highly emotional process that is never finished, never completed and never fulfilled. Being a help to people who are looking for support, not leaving them alone with their fears and worries, gives the feeling of "WE", of security and warmth, and both, the helper and the helped. I find myself in the short four-line poem by an unknown author that I found in an old poetry album:
Do you want to be happy in life
contribute to the happiness of others
because the joy we give
returns to your own heart