“As peer support in mental health grows, we must be mindful of our intention: social change. It’s not about developing more effective services, but rather about creating dialogues that influence on all of our understandings, conversations, and relationships.” - Shery Mead (Founder of intentional Peer Support)
Lisa will describe how Intentional Peer Support can facilitate the creation and growth of healing communities for people with experiences of mental distress, addictions, marginalisation and oppression. In this presentation Lisa will introduce participants to the basic concepts of IPS including short video clips from IPS Founder Shery Mead and Director Chris Hansen to demonstrate IPS in action. Intentional Peer Support evolved from the psychiatric survivor/ service user/ consumer/ mad movement and is deeply rooted in social justice and social change. Lisa proposes that the dominant psychiatric perspective is just one perspective and explanation and one that is privileged over others. IPS offers the opportunity to open up discussions where other explanations and perspectives are explored with a focus on how our experiences impact the way we see the world and our relationships. In IPS the focus is on how relationships can provide opportunities for developing trust, new perspectives, and taking risks to grow. The focus is on the dialogue, the curiosity and the exploration within relationships and spaces where healing becomes possible.
Course Content
Presenter
Lisa Archibald (my pronouns are she/ her/ hers) moved back home to Scotland in 2020 after living and learning in New Zealand for 7 years where she supported the growth & development of their Intentional Peer Support Aotearoa NZ hub. Lisa first accessed peer support 20 years ago as a university student and has benefitted from accessing peer support to navigate a number of existential crises in the many years since. After graduating with a degree in psychology Lisa started to facilitate peer support groups then went on to manage peer services and eventually became a relationally informed trainer and co-reflector. Lisa was a UK Winston Churchill fellow in 2013 and a Yale University Let(s) LEAD fellow in 2019. She is currently an MSc Mad Studies student in Edinburgh and works part-time for IPS Central in an operational and trainer role. Lisa is a solo adult raising a teenager and a nearly teenager in the Scottish Borders, has a kiwi cat called Shadow and has been learning (slowly) Scots Gaelic for the past 3 years.
Liz Brosnan; Having spent years on the ‘outside’ as a service user, then exploring recovery and involvement work, progressing into academia, trying to make change happen on the edges of mental health systems, Liz is now working on the ‘inside’ in the heart of services to see what can be achieved with good allies. In a cv spanning decades, she has worked with many incredible people to bring service-user/survivor/persons with psychosocial disabilities/Mad voices out of the margins into the mainstream. She has worked in many arenas: local community activism, peer advocacy, user-led/survivor research, academic writing and publishing, training and education, disability rights research. Returning to work in HSE MHS mental health engagement, she is optimistic that Intentional Peer relationships, will allow us to create safe spaces within and without statutory services.
