Do you know an answer to a following question. Why not merely tear the mental health system down and replace it entirely with peerbased supports? Why bother to transform a fragmented, ‘over medicalized’, ‘underfunded’, and frequently xic system in part through peer introduction support when it might be better just to offer caring, reciprocal, genuine human relationships? He sees how much easier his own job has become as a result. Let me tell you something. One psychiatrist who had openly laughed in my face when I first suggested hiring peer staff acknowledged recently that he has become a staunch advocate of peer support because he has seen how much more peer staff can do with people than he ever was able to do as their physician. Seriously. There is no question that this does happen. In different settings, I have seen the transformative impact that peer staff can have on mental culture health agencies, at identical time. This is only one equation side.
The partnership between peer supporters and ‘non peer’ mental health staff is still early in its evolution.
People millions who already rely on it, and the millions more people who do not yet seek help or derive any benefit from it, we actually have to see if we can make it better in part through the efforts and influence of people in recovery, before abandoning the mental health system. You see, people in recovery know three very important things. With all that said. Value, and benefit from their accumulated wisdom, ideas, and energy, we might be able to create gether a system that is more accessible, respectful, and responsive to all those in need whether or not they choose to join, or to become invested in helping to further improve, the system that cared for them, if we can invite.
There continues to be a large, unmet need for peer support across the country.
There remains a tremendous need for people to receive the message that recovery is real and possible for them, and to benefit from the support peers can provide. Also, at identical time, there remain influential people in mental health systems who continue to think that peer support gether with anything else related to recovery concept is nothing more than unsubstantiated rot. Over thirty states have already secured Medicaid reimbursement for peer support, and many other states have found ways to fund peer support without Medicaid. Eventually, that is what I would like to address in this piece. Perhaps this situation is no different from that of other diffusion innovations in medicine or society at large like the transition from horse drawn carriages to cars but it strikes me as an important consideration in deciding the future of peer support.
The answer to which I have come thus far is that we need both.
And, importantly, people need to have the opportunity to choose those forms of care and support that they will find most safe, comfortable, culturally relevant, and effective for them. Peer support, like other innovative supports, reaches only a small fraction of those persons experiencing distress or struggling with mental health issues. Even were funding for peer positions radically increased overnight, there would remain a need for other forms of care as well. Other people, who may not yet have experienced such trauma at the hands of ‘helpers’, may not necessarily want to advocate for or against anything. Generally, that is because, compared to persons large number presenting for mental health care through conventional channels, very few people utilize selfhelp or mutual support options available to them in their community. Hundreds of people fighting against mental health care are people who was hurt by it. They may simply want to get on with their own lives as best they can. For those people, and for the even larger number of people who experience mental distress and neither seek nor receive any help at all formal or informal new and other approaches are sorely needed. Also since the fact that people do not necessarily want to become part of a cause or a community, especially ones with which they do not identify personally, this ain’t only because of distress medicalization. And a history of disproportionate funding.
What is the crossroads nature at which peer support currently finds itself?
This reality was reflected all o clearly in a recent article in which peer staff were uted as a cheap way of helping people with mental illness stay on their medications. An instance of what Freire observed as the oppressed becoming oppressors, They are allowing themselves to be exploited as a means of making it possible for systems of care not to have to change identical practices that harmed them in the first place. From such a perspective, persons in recovery who occupy provider positions in conventional mental health programs are seen as committing a kind of betrayal. Whenever continuing to be the valuable alternative to treatment mutual support has been since the 1960s, these kinds of developments provide further evidence to ‘self help’/mutual support advocates that peer support should not be provided within mental context health services at all, should remain separate and apart from the mental health system. Do concerns that persons in recovery are increasingly being exploited by their employers to provide same more unhelpful services that were already being provided by mental health staff at a lower cost, with giving added benefit their agencies the appearance of being ‘recoveryoriented’, as the discipline grows.