Peer support in community settings: getting back to our roots

Published date12 June 2017
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/MHSI-03-2017-0010
Date12 June 2017
Pages184-190
AuthorDavid Crepaz-Keay
Subject MatterHealth & social care,Mental health,Social inclusion
Peer support in community settings:
getting back to our roots
David Crepaz-Keay
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to look at peer support in the context of broader communities.
Design/methodology/approach It builds on the authors experience working with the Mental Health
Foundation of developing delivering and evaluating several self-management and peer support initiatives in a
variety of settings with a range of different peer groups. It will consider what constitutes a peer and a
community, and explore the notion of community solutions for community problems.
Findings Peer support in community settings has the capacity to address social isolation, build skills and
self-esteem and give ind ividuals a better quali ty of life it can also add value to whole communities
and reframe the way entire groups are considered within them. It has the ability to be both more accessible
and less stigmatising and thus reach more people. This also offers community based peer support as a
contributor to preventing the deterioration of mental health and potentially reducing the impact of
mental ill-health.
Social implications The author needs to think more in terms of whole community and get better at
improving how the author measures and articulates this community benefit. This will allow us to make better
decisions about how best to apply resources for long term whole community gain. Peer support and peer
leadership needs to be at the heart of this process.
Originality/value This paper places a familiar approach in a different setting placing peer support firmly
outside services and within comunities.
Keywords Leadership, Community, Peer support, Mental health
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Peer support in mental health is a high-profile subject, the recently published UK the Five year
forward view for mental health(Mental Health Taskforce, 2016), for example, highlights just how
important it is to creating sustainable mental health services. Peer support is, however, nothing
new, and is certainly not the exclusive preserve of the mental health field, a recent study (NESTA
and National Voices, 2015) identified over 1,000 research papers on peer support from across
the world covering a range of long term physical and mental health conditions. Beyond health
conditions, peer support has been established for healthy behaviours such as weight loss,
smoking cessation and managing addiction. Just within mental health, a great variety of peer
support approaches exist; some of which are explored in detail in this journal and elsewhere
(see, e.g. Crepaz-Keay and Cyhlarova, 2015). This paper will focus on peer support with a
mental health context, located in broader community settings.
Peer: a person of the same age, status or ability as another specified person (OUP, 2017)
In order to explore peer support in more detail, it is important to understand what is meant by a
peer. From the preceding dictionary definition, statusis probably the most apt of the stated
peer criteria. For the most part, in mental health this is taken to mean at least a shared experience
of mental ill-health or service use, or even psychiatric diagnosis, and it has been argued that peer
support requires other shared experiences, identities and backgrounds(Faulkner and Kalathil,
2012). This is particularly important in community settings where people may not be explicitly
David Crepaz-Keay is based at
the Department of
Empowerment and Social
Inclusion, Mental Health
Foundation, London, UK.
PAGE184
j
MENTALHEALTH AND SOCIAL INCLUSION
j
VOL. 21 NO. 3 2017, pp. 184-190, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 2042-8308 DOI 10.1108/MHSI-03-2017-0010

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