Ever curious to know more about peer specialist work? Are you wondering what encompasses the work of the Peer Specialist Profession? On this podcast, Reuben Hendler, who is a good friend of mind and a psychiatry resident whom I worked with and taught during his residency, interviews me surrounding several subjects related to peer work. This Podcast details how I practice peer specialist work at McLean Hospital, and my perceptions and views of how peer specialists fit within the psychiatric system while also being not of the system.
Being a peer specialist is a unique profession, especially within a psychiatric setting. To qualify as a peer specialist, one must have lived experience with a mental health condition and be trained and certified to use that experience in ways that provide support, inspire hope, and are resourceful to others who are also going through their own mental health struggles or recovery. In our journeys as peer specialists we are with people and alongside them in their mental health recovery as we are going through similar experiences simultaneously. This vantage point is powerful because there are many tools, resources, and anecdotes that Peer Specialists have to offer that clinicians simply aren’t able to provide. Within the podcast, I detail how we work alongside each other and complement each other, and how peer work is an essential component to providing great care.
In my own personal experience, having peer support has been really essential to my mental health recovery. Before starting work at McLean Hospital, I wasn’t connected with peer specialists at all. However, I’ve had a peer supervisor for over four years who has been a really powerful figure for me and who has provided support, resources, stories, and practices that have transformed me as a person and have been essential to my growth and improvement and movement through my mental health condition thus reaching a point where I’m living a full life again.
This Podcast will detail the ethics and morals of being a peer specialist, workplace dilemmas we are faced with, and the constant battle with stigma that we face as people with lived experience in a setting where our conditions are no longer invisible and we know that all our coworkers are aware we have lived experience.
There have been a number of challenges and adversities I’ve faced in pursuing the work and helping to expand the work within McLean Hospital. As a Civil Rights Movement, the Peer Movement rests on the shoulders of everyone who came before us, which is really something I want to emphasize before sharing this Podcast. There were many peers who came before all of us to pave the way so that we could also take the torch and move things forward as well and have the opportunity and honor of providing peer support for others who are also in need.
Here is the link to the podcast, which is forty-five minutes, and is incredibly compelling!
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Previously published on Spotify and Apple
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