Tag: Intentional Peer Support

Interview: Moving Toward a Human Rights Approach to Student Mental Health

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Psychologist Jim Probert of the University of Florida's student counseling center explains why "Our goal is not to take the steering wheel out of the person's hands."

“I Found My Lion’s Roar”: Ro Speight on Combining Peer Support...

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MIA's Ana Florence interviews recovery advocate Ro Speight about her journey from receiving Peer Support to working as a facilitator in Peer Partnered Open Dialogue.

Will the Mental Health Industry Undermine the Community-Based Climate Change Revolution?

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As mainstream mental health ideas and approaches are increasingly incorporated by community resilience-building groups, critics warn about the dangers of pathologizing and medicalizing reactions to climate change.

Deadly Serious: Talking Openly About Suicide

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The suicide crisis is real. The pain is real. The deaths are real. None of us can afford to stick our heads in the sand and pretend that this isn't happening. But the helplessness and confusion about what to do about it are also real. And that's why peer relationships and peer-developed modalities can be so helpful. Many of us have been there and are still alive to talk about it. We know what ways of relating gave us hope and helped us to continue on.

Who Gets to Define ā€œPeer Support?ā€

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The definition of ā€œpeer supportā€ should be straightforward. But over the years, ā€œpeer supportā€ seems to have morphed into ā€œpeer specialistā€Ā ā€” or, to put it more bluntly, psychiatric survivorsā€™ experiential knowledge has been co-opted by the system. How does peer-developed peer support differ from theĀ peer staff model? And what can we do about this?

Chris Hansen: Making Connections Through Intentional Peer Support

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This week on MIA Radio, we interview Chris Hansen. Chris works as Director for Intentional Peer Support and in this interview, we talk about Chrisā€™s personal experiences of the mental health system and how Intentional Peer Support approaches contrast with mainstream psychiatry.

The Downfall of Peer Support: MHA & National Certification

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Mental Health America (MHA) has finally unveiled its newĀ National Peer Specialist Certification over much protest. It is dangerous to what we call ā€˜peer supportā€™ for MHA to have done this. Even if they did it well. Which, as best as I can tell, they did not.

Intentional Peer Support: Creating Relationships, Creating Change

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IPS is about creating a power-balanced, relational context in which we can begin to explore and even challenge the stories we have been taught. We can name our experiences, and challenge the meaning that we have constructed around those experiences. This fundamentally alters what we think of as ā€œhelp,ā€ but also challenges social and political constructs of disability.