I’m running an EDS and/or POTS support group on Sunday that meets every few months, and one of the groups I posted it to took down the announcement because it was “in competition” with their group, which also meets every few months (not at the same time).
This makes me sad. I would like to see thousands of these groups, so that anyone who wanted to could go down the block on any given day and get the support they need. Never would it cross my mind not to advertise other groups – in fact, I do it all the time. The only reason I started running these groups in the first place was to become the very thing I most needed, because it was so rare and virtually inaccessible.
If the chronic illness community sees support groups as competitions, we’ll have even less help than we already do. We have too many enemies within our own bodies to also have to combat each other. Imagine, by contrast, if we all worked together (the way so many of us already do) – what couldn’t we accomplish?
PS: Now I have another guy angrily telling people that because he once went to a support group in *Milwaukee* that wasn’t good, people shouldn’t go to mine, either, and that “Facebook is better.” %@*#@$%
</rant>
