Support services for mental health within the UK is overwhelmed and overstretched. The mental health services available is often difficult to navigate, presents challenges that can be discouraging and if explored privately can be costly.
Just Family Peer Support is an approach that helps individuals who are struggling and the practice of peer support fosters a connection based on similar lived experiences.
Under the Just Family CIC umbrella, Peer Support is when an individual uses their own lived experience to support and guide others who are struggling with similar (and sometimes not so similar) experiences. As the Just Family peer support specialists, we are using our lived experience to support others.
Our peer support practitioners undertake a robust training program designed to teach methods about fostering connections, achieving balance in relationships, and recommending helpful coping mechanisms.
They are guided to be active listeners and learn how to selectively self-disclose personal experiences. Lived experience is the main credential for being a Just Family Peer Support Practitioner.
Our peer support mental wellbeing groups provide a safe holding space for individuals where there is a validated ability to genuinely relate.
Benefits of Peer Support:
- Connection – often, when people feel depressed, overwhelmed, or anxious there may be a void of connection to others. Peer support can be a way that someone who may otherwise feel isolated gains a sense of personal connection, particularly because there might be a common experienced shared between the peer support practitioner and the individual.
- Validation – if an individual feels alone and isolated in their experience, it may prompt emotions of sadness and despair. Peer support can help an individual feel validated and heard in their experience. It can also help an individual to feel a greater sense of worth.
- Normalisation – feelings of isolation can prompt loneliness. Knowing that someone else has experienced similar feelings can help an individual to feel as though his or her experience is not abnormal, which can be both meaningful and reassuring.
- Purpose – peer support can provide purpose both for the individual and for the peer support practitioner. The idea behind peer support is to listen to and reinforce an individual in their individual experience. This can provide purpose to the work that the peer support practitioner is doing and help the individual to recognise his or her own purpose and value.
- Hope – mental ill health like depression, anxiety, and/or persistent feelings of panic can be debilitating for people. In the midst of emotional despair, it is not uncommon for an individual to lose hope. Peer support can be a lifeline of hope for someone who is struggling. A peer support practitioner opening up about their own challenges may be very comforting in the moment and allow the individual to have trust and share their experience. That shared experience and connection can be a catalyst to bringing about or restoring hope for a person.
The majority of the attendees at our Peer Support Mental Wellbeing Groups are signposted to Just Family CIC from mental health primary and secondary care services, to provide interim support whilst awaiting recommended psychological intervention.
Accessing support via Just Family CIC has reduced the need for individuals to access formal psychological interventions and therefore reduces the pressures on NHS psychological wellbeing services.