Abstract
The current study seeks to determine how peer support roles change as peer support specialists’ positions within organizations and departments mature. We followed ten peer support specialists over the course of a year, interviewing them at three points, starting approximately three months after they began working as peer support specialists. We used an inductive process to analyze our data and followed guidelines on the structuring of longitudinal qualitative trajectories to divide the data into watershed moments. Our participants worked in a variety of departments in the hospital, and their service use experiences generally echo those of their service users. Participants appear to pass through four phases over the course of their employment as peers: early beginnings, establishing the role, role narrowing, and role sustainability. Services wishing to integrate new peers must be aware of the time required for integration. Having general job descriptions limited to specifying that peers are expected to use their lived experience to support current service users may lead to uncertainty amongst new and existing staff. Without role clarity, peers may struggle to find their place. Pairing new staff with mentors may limit this burden. As roles consolidate, boundaries may emerge. If these boundaries narrow the role of the PSS, they may no longer find the role appealing. They may then choose other caregiver roles with wider or different spheres of influence. Organizations may benefit by clearly indicating if they expect peer support positions to be static or transitionary.
Highlights
Personal recovery and recovery-oriented care models have slowly but steadily gained traction in many western countries during the past three decades
Their ethnicities reflected those of Singapore, with representation from Chinese, Malay and Indian groups. They described reaching post-secondary education. While these traits suggest peer support specialists (PSS) were younger than the average hospital service user, achieved higher level of education, and they include more women, their mental health and service experiences, by virtue of the way they are selected and placed within the hospital, resemble those of their service users
Peer support work is of great value, and greater attention needs to be placed on how PSS are integrated within organizations
Summary
Personal recovery and recovery-oriented care models have slowly but steadily gained traction in many western countries during the past three decades. This paradigm shift is congruent with the overt commitments and declarations made by the American Surgeon General David Satcher in his 1999 landmark report on the need to redefine mental health service models (Davidson, 2016). Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research such recovery-oriented models These models rely on people with lived experience of mental illness to provide support to others currently experiencing mental illness during their recovery journey (Perkins & Repper, 2019; Repper & Carter, 2011; Salzer et al, 2010). These types of service providers are called peer support specialists (PSS) and obtain their professional qualifications after their experiences of mental illnesses, differentiating them from service providers in recovery
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