Membership Criteria and Services

Indicators for Membership

• You are an adult (over 16 years old).
• You normally reside within Aberdeenshire South.
• You have experienced acute or chronic mental ill-health, causing personal distress and problems in everyday living.
• You have required support, assistance and guidance for mental health problems from other professional or appropriate agencies within the past 2 years.
• Social contact of the type that Pillar provides is likely to be beneficial to your mental health.
• You come to Pillar of your own free will.

What Needs Can Pillar Meet?

Pillar is primarily there to facilitate the kind of social contact which positively enhances mental health, both within Pillar meeting places and elsewhere in the community. While it is not a treatment service, people who use Pillar will be able to access advice, information and support when they are in crisis or in distress.  Members are expected to make positive choices about the groups or sessions they wish to use in conjunction with other community resources or facilities.

Moving on from Pillar

Membership of Pillar is not necessarily for life. Pillar is there to be used as a stepping-stone into ordinary activities and services.

Reviews of existing membership are undertaken on a rolling basis with regard to our membership criteria and individual annual reviews.

Moving on should be a positive choice and experience for Pillar members. The friendships that people form through Pillar can be maintained outside Pillar without any direct Pillar involvement.

Moving on is not a one-way process, and ex-members may return to Pillar at any point where their needs are compatible with the service we provide.

Annual Reviews

Annual reviews identify people who are ready to move on, and members receive help to do so both as individuals and in groups.  Members are given review dates during the course of each year.

As part of their annual review, existing members are encouraged to review their contact with Pillar and, with support and help from staff, to move towards making active choices about how they use the service; this may include identifying activities and services outside Pillar that the member might use.

Any choices that members make are viewed flexibly so that members are able to lean more heavily on the service when less well.

Where the initial review indicates that a member is using Pillar inappropriately, they will be given suggestions for alternatives to explore. It may be that, in subsequent reviews, such a member may be asked, with active help, to move on from Pillar.