The 1970's have been described as the self-help decade. This paper has shown how the groups explicitly focus on certain specific but simple technical problems while implicity addressing a whole range of everyday problems of living. Self-help groups attempt to solve these technical and social problems by a process based on shared experience in a context of mutual understanding. An essential ingredient of the self-help solution is to do things together, while social activities with members outside the group meetings sustain the self-help method and give new meaning to a member's life and to his conception of his place in the world.