-
Supporting Peer Mentoring as a Bridge to Campus Belonging
Across colleges and universities, students are experiencing increasing mental health challenges while simultaneously navigating the social, academic, and developmental demands of campus life. For many students, the transition to college represents their first time living independently, managing...
-
Strengthening Behavioral Health Through Peer Services: Advancing Recovery Across the Continuum of Care
Recovery from addiction is often strengthened through connection with others who have lived experience. Across New York State, peer professionals - individuals with lived recovery experience - are playing an increasingly important role in behavioral health services. Through strategic policy...
-
Meeting Crisis With Connection: The Power of Peer Specialists on Mobile Crisis Teams
Over the past several years, New York City has increasingly shifted toward community-based responses to behavioral health crises. In the past, individuals experiencing psychiatric emergencies were often limited to hospital emergency departments or interactions with law enforcement. While those...
-
The Value of Being Seen: Acknowledging the Importance of Shared Identities and Lived Experiences
It is a well-known fact that our traditional mental health care system has experienced a strain over the past six years. Not only are there ongoing needs for services across communities, but also an ongoing staffing crisis that impedes the successful delivery of those services. Mental health...
-
Beyond Boundaries: Oh, the Places Peer Support Can Go!
Peer support has always been bigger than the box systems tried to paint it in. Long before it was codified, credentialed, or added into service plans, it was ordinary folk reaching for one another—standing in the front, behind and to the side of each other sharing hard-earned wisdom, offering...
-
Healing, Growth, and Purpose: Becoming a Peer Specialist
On January 14, 1980 (my birthday) I sat at a drafting board at Island Drafting and Technical Institute in Amityville, New York, beginning my journey as a mechanical draftsperson. One thousand hours later, I earned my certification and was placed through the school's employment services at an...
-
Addressing Workplace Stigmatization of Peer Colleagues Through Institutional Courage
It is well documented that people with mental illness and substance use disorders (MI/SUD) are stigmatized across all levels of society. So, it is not a surprise that peer support specialists regularly experience stigmatization in the workplace, including negative messages from colleagues about...
-
Substance Use Disorders: Supporting Individuals in Early Recovery Through Peer-Led Services
The first days and weeks of recovery from a substance use disorder are among the most precarious in any individual’s health journey. Detoxification has been completed, the immediate crisis has passed, and now the real work begins: rebuilding a life without substances. Yet this is precisely when...
-
A Brief History of Peer Support and its “Integration” into Behavioral Healthcare: The Uneasiest of Bedfellows
The proliferation of peer services throughout the behavioral healthcare and social welfare systems has transformed them in ways their progenitors might not have anticipated. The peer support and recovery movements originated in eighteenth-century France under the auspices of Phillipe Pinel and...
-
Implementation of Peer Support Roles in Street Medicine and Outreach: Challenges and Possibilities
“We’re not here to belittle you. We’re not here to down talk you. We’re not here to tell you what you should or shouldn’t be doing because that’s not our place.” - Lavaughn Johnson, Peer Navigator at ReVive Center for Housing and Healing At the intersection of homelessness and...
