Peer support is the natural condition of all human beings. Key to all forms of peer support is that you have an opportunity to both give and receive help. One of the problems of our current mental health system is that it doesn’t value the experience of mental illness, and therefore there is no role for those people who become mental ill. That is slowly changing today – thanks to peer support.
Within the mental health induustry Peer Support Specialists (PSS) are absolutely unique.
This is because a Peer Support Specialist is a person who has a diagnosis of mental illness who has been specially trained to work with other individuals living with mental illness. As such they relate directly to the people they serve.
The role of a PSS is not like anything you have ever seen before.
PSS are not case managers, doctors, nurses or counselors. Each of those roles was learned through training and education. The Peer Support also learns through training and education, but has in addition to that “lived experience” of mental illness and recovery.
See video: Healing Through Peer Support http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJAOwR_kN6U
Peer Supports are unique in so far as they are able to function in a capacity based exclusively on mutually and trust – as equals with one another.
Peer Support Specialists are also the only ones serving within the mental health system today who can “facilitate” hope and recovery in the lives of the people they have the privilege to serve. Doctors, psychiatric professionals, case managers, clinical supervisors, site administrators can’t do that.
PSP play a critical role in recovery from mental illness today. One that is often under appreciated.
In many ways Peer Supports also represent a real paradigm shift in the way we understand mental illness, recovery and the way we should organize or reorganize our mental health services.
Some might say that peer support (or “mutual help”) it is the natural condition of human beings. All religions and secular philosophies seem to agree we are all interdependent on one another and we are all very much the same.
See video: Peer Support in Mental Health Recovery http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQR01GLzE9A
What Peer Support do is also unique.
For example a Peer Support Provider does not focus on the person’s problems and limitations. Instead he or she focuses on the person’s strengths. They don’t interpret what their experience means, or make people conform or behave to a particular standard. Instead they accept people as they are.
See video: Peer Perspectives: Promoting Recovery through Peer Support http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDW6znQB76E
PSP sit with people when they need support, they encourage people to succeed. They don’t offer solutions to people problems or define what success or recovery looks like for others. They don’t prescribe medications or give medical advice on what type of prescription they take. That is not what peer support do.
See video: What is a Peer Specialist? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0HXdU1-mHY
See video: Peer Support around the world – Uganda http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d40zY0sEJLY