Becoming a Peer Support Worker
The role of a Peer Support Worker (PSW) has been developed specifically for people who have lived experience of recovery from mental health challenges. A PSW provides formalised peer support, to help service users regain control over their lives and their own unique recovery process.
They work alongside service users, empowering them to improve their quality of life and overcome mental health challenges.
As someone who has experienced their own recovery journey a Peer Support Worker draws upon their personal experiences to share insights, offer hope, and demonstrate that recovery is possible. By talking about their own experiences of recovery they inspire others, provide valuable perspectives and support service users in finding their own path towards living a meaningful life alongside mental health challenges.
PSWs offer empathy and compassion helping to normalise what services users are feeling and what they are going through. They create a safe space where individuals can recognise that they are not alone in their journey. It is through this trusting relationship, which offers empathy and empowerment, that feelings of isolation and uncertainty can be transformed into hope, self-belief and a sense of personal control and self-advocacy.
Peer Support Workers within NSFT
Within NSFT Peer Support Workers are mental health practitioners who works clinically, within a multi-disciplinary team (MDT), providing care to service users. They have experienced mental health challenges either themselves or as a carer, relevant to the service they work within, and live alongside these role-modelling recovery. Working within the principles and values of peer support, they provide formalised peer support to service users and play an important role in the MDT contributing to service user care by providing a unique insight into the challenges, triumphs, and nuances of the recovery journey.
What a Peer Support Worker is not
Peer Support Workers are mental health practitioners that work clinically within mental health teams however, they don't diagnose or provide treatments, they are not lead carers for service users and they do not offer therapy or advice. Peer support is based only on lived experience of recovery, plus some technical skills gained through training.
Benefits of being a PSW
Peer Support Workers find there are many benefits to their role:
- Gain greater confidence and self-esteem
- Increased feeling of empowerment on their own recovery journey
- Develop a more positive sense of identity
- Feel more valued
- Feel less stigmatised
- An opportunity to gain more skills
- General benefits of being employed
A few our PSWs have spoken about their experiences of becoming and being a Peer Support Worker.