Sharing what is possible and supporting change: the Scottish Recovery Network’s Peer Recovery Hub

Peer support is an integral component of what makes community-led health such an effective approach. Christine Muir describes the strengths of peer support in the context of mental health and wellbeing and the work of the Scottish Recovery Network and highlights some of the fantastic resources on their Peer Recovery Hub.

At Scottish Recovery Network we bring people, services and organisations across sectors together to create a mental health system that embraces peer support and is powered by lived experience.

Much of our work centres on challenging the way in which lived experience and peer support is seen and developed within Scotland’s mental health system. This includes making sure people with lived experience are involved in a meaningful way in the design and delivery of mental health support in their communities.

Our Peer Recovery Hub is full of free tools, events and opportunities to inspire you to develop and champion peer support. It’s a space where we shine a spotlight on your fantastic peer support projects, services and organisations. A place to share ideas and learning from people planning and delivering peer support activities, to help you do the same.

What makes peer support different?

With peer support we are often taking something that happens naturally between people and formalising it. This can happen through the creation of groups, peer worker roles and peer services. That’s why it is important not to lose the core essence of peer support: shared lived experience which builds trust and empathy; a mutual relationship of equals where people walk alongside rather than ‘fix;’ a supportive relationship based on hope and belief; and intentional space where people explore together and work towards recovery.

One of the challenges we face is that peer support is often mis-represented as an optional add-on or inferior to clinical approaches to support. What the innovation of the third sector is showing us, is that peer support is an essential part of our response to mental health challenges. Community-based peer support is accessible and tends not to have long waiting lists, complicated referral processes and a dominant medical model narrative that focuses on diagnosis alone. Peer support takes a whole person approach to mental health recovery, working alongside other types of support. This is not a process focused on assessment and advice, but a very personal journey where sharing with others helps us to better understand our experiences and feelings, develop insight and figure out what will work for us.

What’s on the Peer Recovery Hub?

Drawing from learning, from partnership work across the country and beyond, the hub includes a range of free co-designed resources. These adaptable tools will help you to plan, deliver and sustain different peer support activities and roles.

Let’s do Peer Group Facilitation is for anyone interested in developing peer support groups. Giving you a direction of travel but also allowing you to divert along the way – dipping in and out of the resources – to suit your own needs.

Want to introduce, develop and sustain peer support roles in your organisation? The Let’s Develop Peer Roles toolkit shares knowledge from people both delivering and accessing peer support.

The Peer Connects series is a programme of themed participatory events, webinars and practice learning sessions where you can connect and share with people passionate about the power of peer support.

Peer support has a vital role in suicide prevention and the Creating Hope with Peer Support project is working with local and national suicide prevention partners to boost community-based peer support groups across the country.

This includes co-delivering workshops to build confidence in developing supportive peer relationships with people affected by suicide; local learning and networking events; and a new resource to help groups, organisations and services offer community-based peer support.

Peer support is powerful, and it works. You can be a part of Peer Support in Action! as we work together to develop the peer landscape in Scotland and show the world what peer support can do.

Access the Peer Recovery Hub.

Get in touch with Scottish Recovery Network to share your examples with the Peer Support in Action project or for an informal chat about developing peer support where you are.