Supporting peer relationships
The importance of relationships is central to the idea of personal recovery. Peer relationships play an important role, but relationships with professionals and other members of the mental health services are also important.
People with their own experience of mental illness (‘peers’) can directly contribute to the recovery of others.
Meaningful peer involvement is associated with innovative recovery-oriented services internationally.
There are three types of peer support for recovery.
Mutual self-help groups
Mutual self-help groups emphasise the lived experience that the members of the groups share. This leads to structures based on the assumption that all participants have something to contribute to its running.
Peer Support Specialists
The peer support specialist is a role in the mental system for which personal experience of mental illness is a job requirement.
Creating peer support specialist roles brings four types of benefit.
For the specialist...
Their own lived experience is valued, transforming negative experiences into helpful experience.
They give to others, which is an important component of healing. They are able to consolidate their recovery skills.
For other staff...
Their presence leads to increased awareness of personal values. Interaction of this kind challenges stigmatising ‘them and-us’ beliefs and behaviour within services in a natural rather than forced way.
For other service users...
Peer support specialists provide visible role models of recovery – a powerful creator of hope. There may also be less social distance than with staff, leading to more willingness to engage with services.
For the mental health system....
Peer support specialists can be carriers of culture. There is often less need to train and maintain a pro-recovery orientation in recovered service users and ex-users, because of their own lived experience.
Peer-run programmes
A peer-run programme is more than simply an organisation staffed by people with lived experience of mental illness.
It is a service whose purpose is to promote personal recovery through its values and operating practices.
Peer-run services have a very different feel to traditional mental health services: they directly communicate the message that the experience of mental illness is an asset.
Their central goal is to support people to re-engage in determining their own future.
