This blog is intended to be a resource for peer specialists working in mental health. Within the blog you’ll find links to helpful articles and organizations, as well as links to practical tools for use in peer support work (such as anger diaries, mood charts, goal plans, and nutrition programs).
I myself (the creator of this blog) am a peer specialist working in Pennsylvania. My diagnosis is bipolar, with symptoms of PTSD.
As a new peer specialist, I’ve found one of my biggest challenges is simply finding tools to help me work with my peers. Counselors have a myriad of therapies at their disposal; psychiatrists have a variety of medications to work with; but what about peer specialists? I don’t know about you, but I need more than simply psychiatric advanced directives and WRAPs to help me do my job! I need something to give my sessions with peers direction and focus–resources that can help my peers help themselves.
Due to my frustration over the lack of tools in my “peer specialist toolbox,” I’ve spent some time searching the Internet for helpful resources. The resources I’ve found are linked here, in this blog. If you are a peer specialist too, I hope you find them helpful. If you have a mental illness/are a consumer/survivor/ex-patient (or however you define yourself) but are not a peer specialist, feel free, of course, to use anything here that is helpful to you, too!
Recovery is possible… and it’s more probable when we take steps to heal ourselves.
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Additional note: this blog contains links to other blogs on mental illness, psychiatry, c/s/x activism, and mental health law. These are blogs I enjoy reading and have found useful. Often, it is the words of people with mental illness themselves that are the most helpful, the most down-to-earth, and offer the most practical suggestions for recovery. If you choose to read a blog linked here, I hope you will enjoy it and, like me, find something of value within it. However, I should say that not all these blogs necessarily represent my views (nor the views of the agency I work for), and that some of the language and topics in some of these blogs can be… colorful. So if you are easily offended, or if you have been traumatized in the past and are triggered by cursing or certain topics, please take care in reading these blogs.
All blog entries on the home page of this site, Recovery Support, are my own writings unless otherwise noted.
Thank you for doing this blog! It’s great. I just started as a peer support worker in a peer driven project. The next two weeks actually, I will be in CPS training. I really appreciate how you have pulled together so much information here and in reading what you have to say. I had been feeling rather lost before this!
I’m very intrigued by “peer specialist in mental health” would love to hear more. I once had a friend in “peer counseling” where she and her friend went through some training to counsel each other. Is this the same thing? I’m a psychologist and I’m impressed with the framework you’ve already set up here on your blog. And that is wise advice about various blogs possibly becoming triggers.
Hi individual voice,
Various states are taking steps to make “peer support services” Medicaid reimbursable services. What exactly ARE peer support services? Um yeah… we’re still all figuring that out!
Basically, as a peer specialist, I do peer counseling for adults with mental illness. (But no one will call it counseling, for liability reasons.) I also help people with mental illness reintegrate into the community (if they’re coming out of state hospitals), or help those already in the community learn more daily living skills to help them become more independent (and hopefully, eventually, less dependent on the mental health system). Finally, I act as a client advocate within my agency. So if, for example, someone really wants to try a different medication, but their psychiatrist isn’t… listening… then I can go in and advocate for the client (or better yet, teach the client self-advocacy skills).
That’s what I do with the clients. The goal is to give them more control over their treatment and their lives.
My less official role is to advocate for systems change, to try to help my agency become more client-directed… to move away from a “medical model” of psych care and towards a more individualized, client-centered, “recovery model” of psych care.
Still figuring it all out, though. Brand new position… not many mentors or established tools to help!
Hi,
I just wanted to congratulate you on your blog! And I wanted to make sure that you had seen my YouTube channel – it tells my story of recover and shares the theories that can help people lead to recovery, in an interesting way, I hope.
The link is below. My ’so-so’ blog is above. I use it more to provide links to resources like yours, which I will do now!
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=bipolarorwakingup
Happy Holidays!
Sean
i would like to send a notification to this site. is there an e-mail address where i can do so?
Hi, your site is wonderful. I am looking at quoting some parts of it … I do not seem to be able to ‘find your name’ so i can list you as the author … Can you point me in the right direction? Thanks so much Kathleen
sorry – meant to tick the box re notification – doing that now