Peer Support Specialists and Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice: Lay Experts and Recovery in Mental Health Organizations1

Abstract

Through in‐depth interviews, this study explored the objective and subjective experiences of 14 peer support specialists (PSSs) working in three community mental health centers. Abductive analyses identified Bourdieu’s theoretical framework as a useful tool to understand how peers constructed and enacted a distinct theory of practice which shaped their roles as lay experts. Recovery was the peers’ primary habitus (predisposition) and their recovery‐based theory of practice was supported by cultural frameworks and materialist resources. Despite resistance from some mental health professionals adhering to the medical model, three types of capital (economic, social, and cultural) enabled and legitimated the peers’ recovery‐based practices. Together, these sources of capital formed a palpable degree of symbolic capital that supported the peers’ recovery journey while also structuring and legitimizing their presence in the workplace. This study has implications primarily for mental health policy and research. It offers theoretically guided insights into how lay experts in mental health subjectively understood and objectively realized their recovery‐based role through material and symbolic sources of capital. Furthermore, these accounts extend our understanding of recovery beyond an endeavor that is practiced and realized by individuals. Recovery also is facilitated and reproduced at the organizational level by the community health agencies.