Topic Tuesday // Let’s talk about systemic change: The Victorian Royal Commission // Tues 17th August, 7:00-8.30PM AEST

[Mex]

How do you 'qualify' for a peer support role, everyone has different experiences even if we all deal with the same stigma, what makes a good peer worker, is personal experience enough? what else do you need?

[Daisydreamer]

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@BigFeelsClub wrote:

Q. What are you most excited by in the recommendations?

Exciting thing #2. Peer respite.

Imagine if when you’re in a real bad spot, hospital wasn’t your only option. If instead you could check yourself into a residential service that’s homely, inviting, and most importantly that’s run by people who’ve been through their own similar crises.

We’re about to do this in Victoria. (See Recommendation 5 from the Interim Report).

Called ‘peer respites’, these have been run successfully in other countries for years.

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@BigFeelsClub Peer Respite is so needed, and we are seeing it happen in lots of other spaces 🙂 NSW has recently funded services for something similar, and as you mentioned lots of other countries leading the way in this

[Kermit]

Following on from Mex, what support will there be for the peer support workers? Will this be built into the system too?

[BigFeelsClub]

"Hi Graham, a lot of what you talked about in big feels is about how to deal with specific thoughts and feelings. How does this relate to the bigger picture of a huge system where people can lose their way easily depending on the help they get?"

Heya @Mex 

There's lots in this question eh! A huge and often extremely difficult (if not impossible) system to navigate.

One of the biggest pieces of feedback we get from Big Feels Clubbers is that, before they found us, they thought they were the only ones having such a hard time finding support. As my co-Founder Honor Eastly puts it in the podcast we made with the ABC, No Feeling Is Final, she thought she was "a stain on an otherwise perfect system". So I would say, the Big Feels Club part of this - like any peer support community - is firstly around just comparing notes. Realising that, hey, it's not you! It's the system!

But that is not a whole solution is it? We need actual change. So our part in that is advocacy. Raising our voices on behalf of our community, as are many other consumer leaders in Vic and around the country - and as they have been doing for decades before us.

I was in parliament when Vic govt tabled the final report earlier this year. Hearing the Premier (and other politicians) acknowledge, out loud, that this system isn't fit for purpose. Hearing him actually apologise for that. I was surprised at how meaningful I found that. And then, most importantly, seeing the possibility for genuinely changing things for people in distress, with all the changes that this Commission is recommending. There's lots of work yet to be done to make sure the best of it actually happens as it needs to, but it's a start. 

[Daisydreamer]

Q3 @BigFeelsClub: How do services look different when we the service users run them?

[chibam]

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@Daisydreamer wrote:

@BigFeelsClub Peer Respite is so needed, and we are seeing it happen in lots of other spaces 🙂 NSW has recently funded services for something similar, and as you mentioned lots of other countries leading the way in this

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Thank you, @Daisydreamer . This actually flows in to a question I wanted to ask a bit later:

Obviously, @BigFeelsClub @Former-Member , I'm not asking you to be psychic, but just general impressions: What impact do you expect this inquiry will have in the states outside of Vic?

[BigFeelsClub]

Q3 @BigFeelsClub: How do services look different when we (the service users) run them?

When I first started working in mental health in New Zealand, it was at a mental health agency owned, run and staffed entirely by people who’d been through the same messy life stuff I had.

Everyone from the CEO to the cleaners had first-hand experience of their own breakdowns.

I started working there when I was 23, right when my own life was falling apart. It was the first time

in my working life that I didn’t have to pretend I was fine every day.

It was the single most nourishing place to have an ongoing nervous breakdown! Surrounded by people that just ‘got it’.

[BigFeelsClub]

Q3 @BigFeelsClub: How do services look different when we (the service users) run them? (continued)

For our clients, that peer-run agency I worked at in Auckland was an amazing refuge, a place to feel understood, often for the first time in years.

I didn’t realise at the time how rare this is.

But there are a growing number of examples of peer-run services. Here in Victoria there’s SHARC, an addictions service whose CEO was once a client of the service. There’s VMIAC, the representative body for mental health service users in Vic, and Tandem, the carer equivalent (and other peak bodies for consumers and carers in each state). In Brisbane there’s Brook RED an amazing service run and staffed by people with lived experience.

What makes peer-run organisations different is hard to pin down, but you can feel it. It’s in their language. It’s in their whole way of thinking. This quietly radical idea that there’s no difference between me the service provider, and you the service user. These are just the roles we’re playing today, and they could just as easily switch.

[Former-Member]

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@chibam wrote:

My follow-on question would be: are these supports intended to be made available for people who aren't mentally ill, or perhaps more accurately, for people who's problems haven't yet driven the sufferers into "mental illness" or being suicidal?

Or will you have to be pronounced "mentally ill" before you can access them?

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Thanks @chibam, the Royal Commission certainly described a system that will take a broader view of mental health and wellbeing to encompass the social determinants of mental health, beyond just diagnosis. I don't have a blanket answer to your question - but to give you a sense of the broadened access recommended by the Commission, here's an extract from the chapter on responding to trauma (see p. 380 Volume 2):

Consumers will be supported by specialist trauma practitioners through the development of a referral policy which will endeavour to support all consumers impacted by trauma, regardless of:

•age and personal background

•mental health diagnosis (meaning that people experiencing subsyndromal conditions will be eligible for statewide trauma services)

•chronic, worsening or episodic mental health

•the type or source of trauma experienced

•whether or not the trauma was recent

•whether or not the trauma occurred in Victoria (for example, Victorians who were exposed to trauma overseas, or refugees and asylum seekers who have settled in Victoria and have pre-arrival exposure to trauma will be eligible for statewide trauma services

I'll keep digging and see if I can find anything further 

[Daisydreamer]

Hi @Mex,

Great question around peer support work 🙂 @cloudcore and I are both peer support workers, and you are right- we all have different experiences of mental health, recovery and accessing support. A big part of being a peer worker is finding the commonalities and shred learnings in experience, and being able to share your story in purposeful way to support others. 

I love this brilliant video from The Peer Work Hub which explains it really well! It is often a mix of personal experience and skills for supporting others. 

We need more peer workers in services 🙂 Are you thinking of becoming a peer worker?