Peer Support as a Compliment to Clinical Care
My name is Heidi Sasek and I am a member of the College of Registered Psychotherapist of Ontario (qualifying) and hold membership with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association. For 3 years I worked for a non-for-profit organization that specialized in peer/clinical integration. In my management role my responsibilities included overseeing low barrier programming including recovery and wellness programs, drop-in programming, family doctor and psychiatry. I managed an interdisciplinary team of frontline staff including social workers, mental health workers and peer support workers. After my work with non-for-profit organizations I went on to be the founder of KW Mental Health and Wellness, a private mental health clinic.
It was during my shift into a private setting that I quickly recognized the gaps in services and the lack of community. I want to take a moment to name those gaps and discuss how peer programs can counteract them. In a private setting peer programming is not readily integrated or available. Peer support programs allow clients to experience many well known benefits of mutual aid. Perhaps the most prevalent benefit is the experience of universality, the sense of not being alone and the comfort of sharing similar experiences. Feeling like you are not alone is incredibly therapeutic and while this reassurance can come from a therapist in the form of validation, the therapist does not speak from lived experience.
Clients often express to me, especially those with complex trauma, a feeling of not belonging. The role of the therapist can never allow clients to feel a sense of universality from a place of shared experiences. Challenges can be normalized and clients can feel validated when hearing a peer supporter speak of their journeys both past and on-going. Clients can also experience altruism. Peer support programs reduce the power dynamic and allow for shared knowledge and experience between folks, and there is no parallel that exists in individual clinical services.
Interpersonal learning is yet another significant benefit. As a therapist the importance of relationships can not be understated. Adding peer support services offers clients a chance to break reinforcing cycles of behaviour in relationships that are driven by long held beliefs about their identities and value. Although I could fill pages about the benefits of peer support from both an academic standpoint and from a place of my own observation I will only mention one more, the installation of hope. Hearing how someone else has struggled and how they have navigated challenges allows clients to feel hope for themselves. It also combats the stigma around what recovery “should” look like when in reality there is no perfect blue print. In my work as a program manager and as a therapist, the power of peer support is no secret and when integrated with clinical services can create a much more comprehensive approach to recovery. It also falls in line with my ethical duties to promote empowerment and autonomy with the folks I work with.
I regularly encourage clients to seek out the benefits named here by participating in groups, hobbies and activities, and too often there are very real barriers that make accessing this kind of support in the general community difficult or impossible. This is where peer supporters can hold a space for clients to experience these benefits in a way that a therapist could not. I have no doubt that the integration of peer and clinical services is the future of mental health programming. I am thrilled to be walking the walk of working towards making this integration accessible to the clients that I work with, by collaborating with Dunning Consulting in order to create a Peer Support program integrated into my mental health clinic.
