Because this looks bad to the cong. as these five sisters by their grouping together were forming an unsavory "clique". And, according to these elders, "We don't want people to think that we are starting to have a problem with depression and unhappiness."
Back in the late 80's early 90's a group of sisters in my local cong got together and started doing a work book for Adult Children of Alcoholic's on a weekly basis. Some of the sisters were elders wives and some of the work we did involved intense therapy and it always went on for hours into the wee hours of the morning.
We got a lot of pressure from the elders to quit they claimed we couldn't have a "group within a group". When we said we would move our group to an outside source like Al-anon or AA they calmed down a bit and said that they would have to talk to the Governing Body in Bethel. While they were busy trying everything they could to shut us down we kept on. One elder forbid his wife to go, she went anyway because she was learning so much and getting so much help for her depression.
Finally the word from Bethel was that in order to have our group we needed to meet certain requirements one was that we had to have a licensed therapist lead the group and the other was that we weren't to invite any more into the group or start any more groups.
We met their requirements as far as the licensed therapist. She was a therapist who many of the sisters were already seeing and needed 12 step program work for her own use as a therapist as she had never done one.
The second one well we sorta fudged on it a bit......but made sure it was our dirty little secret. The groups all in all lasted for over 2 and a half years. We went through the work book 2 times!
Our experience was written up in one of the Asleep articles but most of it was watered down the real experience was life changing for me and I'm sure doing that work was the beginning of opening my eyes to venturing outside of the Borg for better information than they offered in their books and mags as well as it gave me a good look at how the Elder's view outside help.
Maybe the sisters in your cong could be more sneeky about it, lol.