From Olga Runciman’s YouTube channel: “This talk was originally prepared for the WAPR 2025 conference in Vancouver. In it, I explore the role of peers in psychiatry — and the challenges many of us face within psychiatric systems. I speak about trauma, abuse, and erasure, and how these experiences can deeply affect peers and their work. There’s often a hope that peers can transform psychiatry — that’s what I was invited to speak about — and in this talk, I share my honest reflections on that hope, and what it means in practice.”
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Who pays the piper plays the tune, as they say.
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What’s to discuss? Lived experience hasn’t outlived itself. It’s just finally facing reality, that working in the psychiatric system upholds the system, “peer workers” included. People who think otherwise are fooling themselves.
But some don’t mind working as tokens—as long as they get pats on the head from psychiatrists.
FWIW: I don’t think “lived” or “embodied” experience knows the difference between trauma and abuse.
And what is that worth? EVERYYHING.
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Hi Birdsong,
I’m really curious to hear more about your thoughts on peer support work, if you are willing to share. I definitely agree when it comes to peer support work that happens within the system, and how it becomes co-opted by the system (as was mentioned in the video), but I also know of peer respites and other peer support organizations that are not connected to the psychiatric system (as Olga identified herself as belonging to) — except perhaps by channeling people *away* from it. What do you think of those? What would you suggest is a better way to build alternatives to psychiatry?
-Jasmine
P.S. I also disagree with the supposed distinctions between “trauma” and “abuse”. To the body/nervous system, they’re virtually the same. The distinction is a semantic one, not a somatic one.
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POSTING AS MODERATOR: I really don’t think we’re going to benefit here going into an argument about whether “trauma” or “abuse” are the same or different! I think we can agree that either of them suck, and that using psychiatry’s definition of either is probably going to get us into trouble. Perhaps they are both simply part of a larger category of “shitty shit that happened to us!”
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Hey Steve, that wasn’t my intention. Sorry if it was getting off-topic. I was just saying I agreed with Birdsong for the most part, yet I can also see what Olga was getting at by trying to make the distinction. I was in no way trying to compare one to the other as better/worse! They obviously both suck!
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Clarification: I understand the distinction between “trauma” and “abuse” in the context of Olga’s argument in the video, and I agree with the gist of what she’s saying in that regard, but I simply define those words differently for myself.
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