Rationale for peer support

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/special-reports/revisiting-rationale-and-evidence-peer-support

The rationale for peer support is neither new nor limited to psychiatry. Paid peer support has been around since the birth of the discipline in the late 18th century, with the hiring of recovered patients as staff identified as one of the most essential components of “moral treatment.”2 Harry Stack Sullivan continued this practice in his hospital in the 1920s, while the milieu therapy models that dominated psychiatry for the following decades relied in large part on the benefits of peer support and role modeling.

Outside of psychiatry, the Institute of Medicine reports that various forms of peer support can be found in virtually every branch of medicine that deals with chronic conditions, from asthma and cancer to diabetes and hypertension.3The rationale here is simple; as explained by Fisher and colleagues4 in a recent review, persons with chronic illnesses spend about 6 hours every year in a health professional’s office, while spending the remaining 8760 hours of the year living with and trying to manage their health conditions. In psychiatry, this ratio is likely much less. Whether it is diabetes or mental illness, helping someone to live well with a serious illness is different from treating the illness, and it takes a different investment of time and effort. Simply put, people living with serious mental health conditions need more assistance and support than can be provided by a physician alone.

In psychiatry, as in other areas of chronic illness management, that “more” is typically provided by paraprofessionals. In medicine, there is currently rapid growth in the hiring of community health workers to assist patients with all manner of conditions to engage in self-care and to navigate complex health systems. In public psychiatry, paraprofessionals spend the most time with persons with chronic conditions, but usually have little to no training.