"I have referred students to someone else because I felt they were more qualified to deal with the student's particular problem," says Reisz. "We [Network members] try to get to know one another and each other's area of competence."

The group has received a great deal of support from President Bok and funding from the University, says Nadja Gould, the group's clinical supervisor and a UHS social worker. There are pamphlets about Life Raft in all of the Network offices as well as at the offices of Harvard's other counseling groups, such as Room 13 and Response. Bunn has written letters to senior tutors to tell them about the program and The Harvard Gazette announces the meetings each week. Reisz says, however, that "you can never publicize enough."

Life Raft's weekly meetings follow no plan, nor do the discussions revolve only around death. "You need a place to go where you can just relax for a couple hours," the grad student says. "It's a place where you can cry or sit or can do whatever you want. We don't all talk about the person we've lost. We talk about our lives now, how our family situations have changed. I did not anticipate how much my family would change after the loss of one member."

The group's participants become "dependent on it but not in a bad way," she says. "They are using it as a way to explore new ways to look at their own lives. It is a real self-help thing; everyone there has to be self-sufficient."

As with many self-help groups, participants who arrive skeptical soon become comfortable as they come to know Life Raft's safe and undemanding atmosphere. The grad student says she has seen people brought to a meeting by a friend who, after being cautions at first, will "absolutely break down and find that the best thing they could possibly do was to let loose." When participants leave the meetings, she continues, "sometimes you feel relieved or sometimes you feel sadder than you did before."

There is a distinction between a self-help group like Life Raft and psychotherapy, Reisz explains. "Discussion comes out of what people have been experiencing that week. They come in wanting to talk. Sometimes they simply want to be there."

Life Raft participants with varied problems have different needs. Reisz, who has been to a few meetings, describes how, when people suffer a death in the family, "they feel that people are avoiding them. It is important to be with other people, but [especially] people who are caring and sensitive."

Gould says that Life Raft can fulfill needs that even those who are close to the bereaved participants cannot. Roommates, for example, might not know how to handle the situation, she says. "People who are bereaved," Gould says, "find that other people tune out. These people need not to be closed off."

Those with terminal illnesses have particular problems and needs that the group can address, Reisz says. For them, "it is important to be reassured again that you are a person with some worth and to be honest about the disease you are suffering with and learn to integrate it into your life," he says.

Reisz says the meetings "provide a cove in the midst of the stream of life where people can pull into and have a restful place to gain perspective with others who are also going through turmoil. It is a place of healing."

Moving On

Bunn says that she can see the beneficial effects of Life Raft on the participants. "Over the past three years I have seen some people get healthy again. They go through these losses and can grow and change." She says she occasionally receives letters from former participants who have "moved on."

The grad student says she is not sure how long she will continue to attend the meetings. Next month is the anniversary of her father's death, and she says she will need Life Raft to help her get through that period. "It is a year later. I should be fixed, maybe I won't go as often now, but I know from my own experience that I can't judge that now."