Tag: peer support

Stephen Boren, who posted here under the name Stephen Gilbert, passed away November 12 after a battle with cancer. Stephen offered a unique perspective, working as peer support staff at the same hospital where he had once been held as a patient. We will miss his daily presence on MIA.

Anthropologists study Parachute NYC to identify challenges and opportunities for implementing peer support and Open Dialogue practices.

One of the HVN's fundamental principles is that "the person having these experiences is in the best position to decide or discover what they mean" and thus each person must "not try to speak for" another. The challenge for a family group will likely be for members to move past speaking about our loved ones to find or imagine the space where we ourselves are liberated.

It is time to seriously consider re-focusing our energy and resources away from placing peer staff in roles where they support the mental health system’s status quo, and toward the goal of making high-quality peer advocacy available to people faced with coercion by the mental health system.

Recovery is not a bridge we cross and never return to. Rather, it is more like crossing a stream we ford by side-stepping on different stones. Not all of the stones are as sturdy as some of the others. Yes, we slip at times, only to regain our footing and forge ahead.

The beauty of sticking around for a while is that we’re living to see some of our “outsider” ideas beginning to challenge modern psychiatric doctrine in the public arena, and our “radical” mental health stance is slowly re-visioning important conversations and practices.

I'd like to be peers with anyone struggling against persecution, anyone struggling toward the promise of dignity and respect for marginalized communities, for freaks and weirdos. To fit the diversity of our experiences, maybe our definitions need to be as flexible and individual as we are.

Between my first involuntary psychiatric commitment and my learning that the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement existed, I spent years unnecessarily stumbling along on my own. The Voices for Choices video series was conceived to help connect those in need to the existing movements and resources available to us.

An interview with Professor Jim van Os who says that, arguably, ‘love is the most powerful evidence-based treatment in mental health’. We discuss his recent paper published in World Psychiatry which envisions a future for mental health that moves away from symptoms and diagnoses and towards peer support and lived experience.

I'm drained by talking to people who might be first discovering basic truths about the mental health system that I've been aware of for over 15 years. But my excitement comes alive when I consult with people recently off of psychiatric meds who are interested in doing work similar to me, mentoring others about coming off of psych drugs.

Peer Workers are actively organizing in New York City. This is significant because the mental health system is failing Peer Workers on so many fronts, and it’s long overdue that we start organizing support for ourselves. Peer work started from a social movement on the streets and has ended up a marginalized and co-opted role in a broken system.

Community Peer Respite Planning Council is petitioning King County Council Chair Joe McDermott to fund peer respites in Seattle/King County, Washington. Help them get the needed...

A randomized control trial finds that receiving peer support from individuals with similar lived experiences reduces one’s risk of readmission to an acute crisis unit.

From Psychiatric Times: A recent issue featured an opinion piece by D.J. Jaffe who argued that there is little empirical support for the effectiveness of...

As a service user of the REST project at Mind in Camden, I want to celebrate World Benzodiazepine Day 2018 by telling the world a little bit about what REST has done for me. I’m now 18 months off benzos, but I still attend REST regularly to process the anger and grief I feel about what I went through, and to support those who are still tapering.

In this piece for Psychiatric Times, James Phelps MD writes about the lack of official data on the number of people trying to come off antidepressants and mentions the work of the peer support organisation Surviving Antidepressants.

From The Guardian: In 2013, general practitioner Helen Kingston launched the Compassionate Frome Project, which provides the town's patients with social services and community support...

The definition of “peer support” should be straightforward. But over the years, “peer support” seems to have morphed into “peer specialist” — or, to put it more bluntly, psychiatric survivors’ experiential knowledge has been co-opted by the system. How does peer-developed peer support differ from the peer staff model? And what can we do about this?

From STAT: For the past three years, Boston University has offered one of the few programs in the nation dedicated to teaching students who have...

I am very excited to announce that Voice Collective, a UK-based project supporting children and young people who see, hear or sense things others don’t, has launched the first-ever online forum dedicated to supporting young people who hear voices, as well as their parents, carers and supporters.

I survived not because I received excellent care from the staff on the ward. On the contrary, the treatment was objectifying and cold. It’s not surprising that many end up in suicide behind locked doors. I survived because I felt, however fleetingly, my experiences mirrored by others.

In this piece for On Being, Omid Safi shares how an old Middle Eastern story about a drowning man can teach us how to offer...

In this piece for The Spinoff, Graham Panther, a consultant in Australia's mental health system, speaks to some of the shortcomings of mainstream mental health support....

In April of this year, Sera Davidow authored a blog titled “The Downfall of Peer Support: MHA & National Certification.” I do not agree with much of what she says in her blog, and as the vice president of Peer Advocacy, Supports and Services at Mental Health America I'd like to respond.

In this piece for Science of Us, Lee Daniel Kravetz discusses the impact of media exposure on the rise of bulimia and explores the social...