Peer work – using your personal, lived experience in some way to support others, is a passion of mine. Peer work may be a paid role, an informal willingness to share, or an activist passion in your life. They all count, they are all essential and wonderful, and they all have risks as well as offering opportunities.
I have been engaging in peer work and activism since 2010 when I delivered my first talk outing myself about my mental health challenges. Since then I’ve shared extensively on my blog and other online platforms, and cautiously engaged the media on occasion.
My top posts about navigating, understanding, and struggling with Peer Work:
- Peer Work: How to share your story
- You’re doing it wrong: criticism fatigue and peer work
- Criticism fatigue 2: criticism is essential
- Alone and naked in front of the crowd (Exposure stress)
- Melting down (Exposure stress)
- Facilitating is a challenge
- First abusive, anonymous email
- Learning through love and pain
- Coming home (Post performance blues)
- Poem – at the end (Post performance blues)
- Poem – Voices in the night (Post performance blues)
- Bearing witness to pain and suicide
- Life and art (Exposure stress)
- Disability and employment (Exposure stress)
- On loneliness
- Work, failure, and identity
- Multiplicity and visibility (Exposure stress)
- Freedom and safety for a charged topic
- What is peer work?
- Voices Vic Conference2 (Exposure stress)
- Your Problems are Your Fault (understanding victim blaming)
- Thoughts about peer work, DID, and community
- Boundaries and being human
- Empathy and Bullying (Abuse)
- Bullying (Abuse)
- Staying a person within the mental health sector (Somebodies and Nobodies)
- Into Art (I’m not your guru)
- Why bother blogging?
- Balance
- There’s out… and then there’s out to the neighbours (Exposure stress)
- Homophobia and despair (Abuse)
- Another Coming Out (coming out at bisexual and explaining how I navigate boundaries in blogging)
- Credibility in Different Worlds (Peer work exposure)
- Lived Experience Workforce (tensions within the peer work role)
- I hate hospital (Exposure stress)
- Blogging is strange
- People passionate about mental health (understanding tribalism and group dynamics)
- Peer Work Course
- Quick Tips for Bloggers: Sharing your story online
- The Freak Factor (Minority/diversity stress)
- Is Mental Illness a Disability? (the context of advocacy)
- Follow up to the Inquiry (value of peer work)
- Disclosure
Some examples of my own advocacy and sharing:
Sarah K Reece 