In this episode, the A DAA online support groups. Welcome to the Anxiety Road podcast. This is the involuntary journey, finding treatment options and resources that people have an anxiety, panic attack, or phobias. This podcast is treatment agnostic, and my name is Gena Haskett. There are times where you need to connect to an actual human being, hopefully in person. But, nowadays that seems to be discouraged. So, the next best thing is online.
You need an actual human being to get perspectives from a group of people that share your problem or have similar questions that you have. Now if you're new here, this is the podcast that looks at medical, behavioral health, meditation, relaxation, and X equals the un unknown resources. And in this episode, I wanna take a look at the Anxiety and Depression Association, peer to peer support groups. Just a quick look.
So an online support group can be a platform or a community where you and other folks with anxiety can get together to share commiserate, exchange opinions or provide context to what they're experiencing. Now, there are all kinds of support groups. everything from commercial to nonprofit to faith-based to all hell breaks loose and sometimes they could have two or three, identities at the same time.
The scary to me are the ones that do not have a human monitor or a means to quickly remove spam or hateful content. There are also support groups that only rely on AI bots to filter out certain types of words or content, but otherwise allow humans to be excessively human. This is generally not a good thing. Hopefully you can find an online community that has a moderator and a means of filtering out spam contents or does not allow bullying speech.
And by bullying speech, I mean, someone from a faith-based background telling you that you have to accept their point of view in terms of how to treat the condition, or someone who is. LY anti-medication or someone who believes that the practice of psychology is not valid, that's not helpful. It's one thing to have that opinion. It's another thing to try to pressure other people who may not have that opinion to accept it. So yeah, that's not a good thing.
So the Anxiety and Depression Association of America is a nonprofit organization. They have a free peer-to-peer support group for different types of anxiety conditions, and A DAA uses a company called Health Unlocked to provide the support group and the peer-to-peer portals. You do need to register and sign into the service to participate. Again, it's free. There's no charge.
On the landing page of the support group, you can kind of get a sense of some of the questions and concerns that other people have asked. You might not be able to read all of the responses. Like I said, you do need to log in to get access to the conversations. And before entry, you might want to read and review the rules of conduct.
actually you don't really have a choice either you read the rules of conduct and then accept that, or you click the accept button and are held accountable to following them. Some of the peer-to-peer groups that they have on the website is the A DAA, anxiety and depression support community. That one is English only. They have a similar one that's in the Spanish language. Then there is a group for people who have major depressive disorder.
And finally, there's one for, folks who have post-traumatic stress disorder. I will have the link in the show notes for the anxiety and depression groups. My bottom line is that sometimes you need to know that you're not alone and that someone else understands what you're going through. It's important to understand that these groups are not a replacement for therapy. They are also not useful in an emergency situation, and they do tell you that on the website.
However they are there, if you need to get another perspective about your condition or maybe get some ideas about symptom management or some of the activities that you can do to help you relax or to feel better. And there is nothing wrong with lurking and seeing if this is an appropriate place for you. It might be too intense for you or maybe not intense enough. You're going to have to decide if this is the kind of peer-to-peer group that works for you.
Anyway, it's just a thought and I wanted to share it with you, and I will catch you next time on the Anxiety Road. You can visit anxiety road podcast.com for links and other information resources. You can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast via any of the free podcasting apps and also Apple Podcast, Amazon, Ghana, Pandora, or on the web@listennotes.com. Links to other sites are provided for information purposes only and do not constitute endorsements.
Always seek the advice of a qualified healthcare provider with questions you may have regarding a medical or mental health disorder. This podcast is intended for information and education purposes only, and nothing in the program is intended to be a substitute for professional, psychological, psychiatric, or medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment.