Peer support can help people with mental health challenges. Here's how it works (2024)

FAQs

Peer support can help people with mental health challenges. Here's how it works? ›

By sharing their own lived experience and practical guidance, peer support workers help people to develop their own goals, create strategies for self-empowerment, and take concrete steps towards building fulfilling, self- determined lives for themselves.

Peer support empowers people to make the best decisions for them and to strive towards their goals in their communities. Peers are an essential component of recovery-focused systems and are key across settings and stages of recovery.

Peer support is critically important in addressing the mental health needs of adolescents, as supported by current data and evidence. Peer support among adolescents, initially introduced in the 1970s in the United States as an innovative method to enhance mental health and well-being, has expanded globally.

Peer support is a supported self-management intervention. It happens when people with similar long-term conditions, or health experiences, come together to support each other – either on a one-to-one or group basis. It is enabled through relationships that build mutual acceptance and understanding.

Providing reassurance

One of the most valuable ways that peer support benefits a person is by providing a series of reassurances that can boost the wellbeing of an individual. We reassure people that they are not alone, that recovery is possible and that we can help them to achieve their goals.

How does peer pressure impact our mental health? Positive peer pressure helps us get motivated, perform better and achieve our goals. They also help us become organised and efficient in our responsibilities.

Because peer support is not necessarily a professional service (although it can be), peer support can take many different forms, such as phone calls, text messages, group meetings, home visits, going for walks together, or even household chores like cleaning together or going grocery shopping together.

Provide a space where people feel accepted and understood. Treat everyone's experiences as being equally important. Involve both giving and receiving support. Many people can benefit from peer support, it could be used with aspects such as wellbeing, hope, self-esteem, acceptance, and relationships.

Friends give you people to share your feelings with, to get new perspectives from, or to just do fun activities with. But it's the quality of those friendships—not quantity—that really makes the difference. Quality of friendships has been linked to higher life satisfaction and better mental health.

Benefits of peer pressure

Encouragement: Peers can push each other to do new things, like trying out for the soccer team or the school play. Friendship and support: Feeling supported by someone who accepts them for who they are can boost self-esteem.

What are the three key principles of peer support? ›

Peer support is a system of giving and receiving help founded on key principles of respect, shared responsibility, and mutual agreement of what is helpful. Peer support is not based on psychiatric models and diagnostic criteria.

Intentional Peer Support is a relationship focused, problem solving, and strengths based, trauma-informed approach.

Also known as peer support, peer work is a form of mental health support. A professional who uses peer work to support others is known as a peer worker. Peer workers have had their own experience with life and mental health challenges.

Evidence from systematic reviews without meta-analysis similarly gave a mixed picture regarding psychosocial and clinical outcomes, but indicated more consistent evidence that peer support has a positive impact on recovery, suicidal ideation, and, to some degree, satisfaction with care.

Peer helping assists children and adolescents to feel capable, understood, and responsible. Peer helping teaches young people decision-making skills to help combat negative peer pressure; and provides children and adolescents with communication skills to understand others and be understood.

Peer support can offer a variety of benefits, such as a sense of belonging and connection with those who can relate to your struggles, a safe and confidential space to express your thoughts without fear of criticism, encouragement and advice from those who have gone through similar difficulties, the opportunity to ...

Trachtenberg (2013) [20] found that peer support significantly reduces hospital bed use, with the average financial savings outweighing additional costs of employing peer workers (benefit:cost ratio of 4.76:1), highlighting the cost-effectiveness of peer support.

There are many practical benefits to having supportive relationships, such as knowing people who can provide you with information, advice, guidance, and also tangible support, such as assistance in times of uncertainty. This feature of social support can be comforting and enhance your feelings of security.