ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Psychology for Clinical Settings
Helping people help themselves? Effectiveness of a self-help group for patients with alcohol use disorders – A pilot study
Provisionally accepted
- 1HSD Hochschule Döpfer University of Applied Sciences, Köln, Germany
- 2Lunds Universitet, Lund, Sweden
- 3Universitat Trier, Trier, Germany
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Objective: Peer-led self-help groups are increasingly popular, but research on their effectiveness and processes remains scarce. This pilot study aimed to investigate treatment outcome and the impact of Yalom's therapeutic factors in self-help groups for alcohol use disorders (AUDs). Method: A self-help (SH, n = 32) and a professional-led therapy group (GT, n = 19) were assessed over the course of eight weeks using the General Self-Efficacy Scale (GSE), the Hopkins Symptom Checklist (HSCL-11), and the Therapeutic Factors Inventory (TFI). Multi-level models were applied. Results: The increase in self-efficacy and therapeutic factors was higher in SH than in GT. The decrease in symptom distress did not differ. All results were adjusted for abstinence and prior experience with group treatment. In SH, moderate to large pre–post effect sizes were found, while GT yielded small effect sizes. Yalom's therapeutic factors correlated with positive treatment outcomes, but the examination of the cause-and-effect relationship was inconclusive. Conclusion: This pilot study suggests that the effectiveness of self-help groups is comparable to that of professional-led therapy groups in the accompanying treatment of AUDs. Limitations of the study and recommendations for future research are discussed. However, the small and unbalanced sample, the open-group design, and the absence of consumption and relapse measures limited inference; larger, multi-site studies with balanced groups are warranted.
Keywords: Group Therapy, longitudinal study, Symptom distress, self-efficacy, multilevel modeling
Received: 05 Jun 2025; Accepted: 25 Nov 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wucherpfennig, Borger and Schwartz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Felix Wucherpfennig
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