Core Competencies for Peer Support: Values, Practices and Skills
Lived experience of crisis and peer support van be incredibly valuable when people are experiencing “crisis-level” emotions such as suicidal intensity. Dispensing with stigmatizing and dehumanizing language related to these experiences is a crucial first step, altering clinical and law enforcement practices that feel more like punishment than care is also crucial. Peer specialists and peer empowerment values need to be effectively integrated as supports in intense situations as well. But structural resistance, risk aversion and stigma have prevented anything like widespread involvement of people with lived experience in crisis or suicide prevention programming.
The key to successful integration of peer crisis support is a set of core practices and skills that provide people with lived experience with distinctive competencies for supporting peers in these moments and settings, and the opportunity and confidence to employ them.
In this session, we will present a comprehensive approach to bridging peer support values and practices to support in crisis services and settings, including core skills for encountering threat of violence and suicidal intensity. The presenter will outline the details of one model of advance ‘peer crisis support’ training and provide discussion on the integration of these practices from the point of view of both public mental health and suicide prevention fields.
Date and Time: January 12, 2022, 1:00-2:15pm EST
Presented By: Eduardo Vega, M. Psy, CEO and Founder, Humannovations
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