The growing pains of peer support

Abstract

While peer support has undoubtedly grown in popularity in recent years, with the widespread creation of peer worker roles across western mental health services, popularity on an international level does not necessarily translate to popularity within staff teams for individual peer workers. Currently, evidence is of a low quality and provides mixed results, often finding that peer support produces similar outcomes to traditional mental health services in terms of reducing hospitalisation, and slightly better outcomes in relation to increasing hope and empowerment. Why cannot you just accept me for who I am? I recognised myself in Carlina Whitmore's (2017) article, as she describes feeling unsure of herself as a Peer workers in the mental health system: a transformative or collusive experiment?", in Russo, J. and Sweeney, A., (Eds), Searching for a Rose Garden: Challenging Psychiatry, Fostering Mad Studies, PCCS Books, Monmouth, pp. 183-91. Gillard, S., Foster, R., Gibson, S., Goldsmith, L., Marks, J. and White, S., (2017), "Describing a principles-based approach to developing and evaluating peer worker roles as peer support moves into mainstream mental health services", Mental Health and Social Inclusion, Vol. 21 no. 3, pp. 133-43. Gillard, S., Holley, J., Gibson, S., Larsen, J., Lucock, M., Oborn, E., Rinaldi, M. and Stamou, E., (2015), "Introducing new peer worker roles into mental health services in England: comparative case study research across a range of organisational contexts", Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research, Vol. 42 no. 6, pp. 682-94. Vandewalle, J., Debyser, B., Beeckman, D.,...