Answering To the Need To Grow

We think that society is basically good and potentially wonderful, but

We believe that it is possible to grow to personal maturity. We believe maturity can be shared through friendship, the most fruitful of all human relationships. We believe that by pooling our experiences, carefully using our intelligence and co-operating with competent authority wherever we find it, we can effectively realize the ideal of whole persons in wholesome relationships in a whole community. Changing thinking and behavior patterns while sharing thoughts and feelings with understanding people is considered a very effective way to treat mental and emot:ional distress. This is GROW’s approach based on 50 years experience.

GROW is the largest, the most rapidly expanding and the most broadly accepted organization in Australia which is geared to meet this need. It is a school of adult education for mental health, working through mutual help groups, for all people who acknowledge their need for help at any stage of their development.

It began in Hurstville, in Sydney, Australia, in 1957 when a number of former mental patients came together after hospitalization for mental illness to find their way back to normal living and happiness. Their groups were once called Recovery Groups. Besides using their own resources and helping one another, they resolved to record and keep the insights, attitudes and practical helps that worked for them.

As the groups attracted more and more people who had serious problems, they enlarged the scope of their movement to include prevention as well as rehabilitation. As time went on, the groups multiplied, and people who had not experienced personal collapse began to come to Grow meetings. Normal, everyday people who were experiencing the ordinary stresses of life but anxious to prevent a breakdown were attending Grow. Together, they compiled an extensive understanding of their experience. This accumulation of shared experience is today enriching the lives of many thousands of Growers and their surrounding communities with a unique store of understanding of what mental health is, how it is impaired and lost, and how it can be regained.



















GROW is essentially four things:

• A Program of Recovery and Personal Growth;

• A Group Method;

• A Caring and Sharing Community;

• An Organizational and Legal Structure.

W’s 12-Step Program of Growth to Maturity provides the elementary "know-how” for avoiding and recovering from breakdown. Based on the successful experience of many thousands of recovered members since GROW’s inception, this Program is presented in the language and at the level of the ordinary person.

GROW’s Group Method supplies the much-needed social instrument of this solution throughout society. Its group meetings are structured so as to be educational yet easily mastered and run by non-professional people. The secret of the method is the principle of mutual help: “If you need help, help others. And to help others best, let them help you.”

GROW members, or GROWERS, meet regularly to help each other deal with the challenges of life. Some people come to GROW while struggling with a life crisis such as the loss of a job, a loved one or a relationship. It can be extraordinarily liberating and affirming to share problems with others who are encouraging and accepting, and facing similar issues. GROWERS activate themselves and motivate one another to full realization of their human potential.