Peer specialists’ challenges in the current health care delivery system

Abstract

Peer Support Specialists are effective in helping people with emotional difficulties. Their interventions help people in attaining positive and profound changes in their lives. However, their inclusion in the health care system in the US comes with the paradoxical risk of endangering their identity as peer supporters by transforming their intervention into a mix of mainstream clinical services and recovery approaches, which may have very little to do with recovery practices. This brief article is a follow-up on the ongoing debate on the issue on the critical issue of the identity and integrity of the Peer support model