[NYAPRS Enews] Peer Support: Defining, Educating, and Innovating the Recovery Model

[Briana Gilmore]

NYAPRS Note: At a time when peer support has become a term used to symbolize progress and recovery within a statewide and even national policy landscape, it is valuable to mobilize resources that define, educate, and innovate within its construct. The first chapter of an innovative workbook on Intention Peer Support is available for download here: http://www.intentionalpeersupport.org/articles/
See the excerpt below from one of Shery Mead's excellent articles, which are available at the link above as resources.

Defining Peer Support
Shery Mead; Intentional Peer Support

Peer support is a system of giving and receiving help founded on key principles of
respect, shared responsibility, and mutual agreement of what is helpful. Peer support is
not based on psychiatric models and diagnostic criteria. It is about understanding
another's situation empathically through the shared experience of emotional and
psychological pain.

When people find affiliation with others whom they feel are "like"
them, they feel a connection. This connection, or affiliation, is a deep, holistic
understanding based on mutual experience where people are able to "be" with each other
without the constraints of traditional (expert/patient) relationships. Further, as trust in the
relationship builds, both people are able to respectfully challenge each other when they
find themselves re-enacting old roles. This allows members of the peer community to try
out new behaviors with one another and move beyond previously held self-concepts built
on disability, diagnosis, and trauma worldview. The Stone Center refers to this as
"mutual empowerment" (Stiver & Miller, 1998).

Peer support starts with the basic assumption that meaning and perception are
created within the context of culture and relationships. Our self-definition, how we
understand and interpret our experiences, and how we relate to others is created and
developed from the direct and indirect messages we get from others and the messages we
get from dominant cultural beliefs and assumptions. We find that many of us who have
used mental health services have been told what we "have," how "it" will be treated, and
how we must think about arranging our lives around this "thing." We have then begun to
see our lives as a series of problems or "symptoms" and we have forgotten that there
might be other ways to interpret our experiences.

Because of this, we have felt different and alone and "other-than" much of our lives, leaving us in relationships that have been less than mutually empowering and more often than not, destructive and infantilizing. We have learned to understand our experiences as signs of illness while burying histories
of past violence and abuse. We have lost our power and our choices in most
relationships. We have learned to either "act as if," or we have become dependent on
professional interpretation of our every day experiences. It is not uncommon for us to
then offer (and ask for) help based on this model.

http://www.intentionalpeersupport.org/articles/



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://kilakwa.net/pipermail/nyaprs_kilakwa.net/attachments/20150115/dfcc8d7c/attachment.html>