🎧 Listen to Sarah read this installment of Cured⤴
A few evenings after the On Our Own of Maryland Conference—where I’ve discovered that many, many people have recovered and are recovering from mental illness—I sit at my computer, researching recovery and peer support. It’s painful to discover that recovery is an actual stage of mental illness that many people suffering from psychic and emotional distress transition into. More painful is that there’s a whole community—a lifeforce—dedicated to it. There’s been a we out there all this time.
A fly has gotten into the apartment, and Siddhi is on the hunt. Siddhi moves his body at warp speed (for him) onto the counter and off, onto the kitchen table and off, onto the sofa, and up his cat tree. Twenty minutes later, he’s still at it. It’s like watching Ahab go after the white whale. Siddhi clumsily dashes from one end of the apartment to the other, meowing, lunging, and leaping at the fly. He won’t give up.
I’ve just finished reading Thomas Insel’s Healing: Our Path from Mental Illness to Mental Health. In it, Insel writes that mental illness isn’t chronic and declares that the future of mental health is the recovery model and peer support. During his time at the NIMH, he was known as “America’s psychiatrist.” To have someone with such authority tell us that it’s time to let those of us who’ve experienced mental illness recover is revolutionary. The recovery community and the lessons it has to teach psychiatry, families, and the public are key.
Siddhi comes barreling through the living room. I can’t see the fly he’s after, but he does. And that’s all that matters.
I start researching Peer Support Specialists. In their contemporary form, Peer Support Specialists have been around since the 1980s and 1990s. It’s taken nearly half a century, but mainstream medicine, psychiatry, and policy have finally started to see their value.
In a couple of months, I’ll enroll in my first Peer Support Specialist training course and understand why. The facilitator will explain the primary role of a Peer Support Specialist: to model recovery by sharing the parts of our experience that might help the person.
Peer Support Specialists don’t give advice. We listen and support—hence the name Peer Support. We’re there to draw them out, to help them establish goals, exercise decision-making skills, and develop action plans. Our role is to listen and guide as the client (or consumer) comes up with practical ways to improve wellness in all aspects of their lives: emotional, financial, social, spiritual, occupational, physical, intellectual, and environmental. We empower—we don’t instruct—and appreciate of every step they take (“baby steps” is a degrading term).
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