The Mermaid Sisters: The Significance of Peer Specialists in Psych Rehab Programs

A group of women that I work with had been contributing articles to a woman’s journal that is published in our county. The women live in REACH’s transitional two year treatment program for women with co-occurring disorders. They also attend the psych rehab program where I am the outreach & referral coordinator. The women and I regularly get together at the coffee table of the treatment house where they live and we talk and chitchat over coffee and tea. We discuss our struggles with addiction and mental health, and how that connects to all aspects of our lives as mothers, daughters, sisters, friends, and partners. We also share our journeys into recovery.

We started calling our little group the Mermaid Sisters. We found that we had so much in common and many shared experiences that bonded us and gave us a connection that was hard to put into words. We wrote articles on the friendships of women and how important they are to recovery. We also wrote about the pain of losing a father and still staying clean and sober through the loss. We are currently planning an article on chronic illnesses and recovery and how this impacts not only our addiction, but our mental health and how challenging this can be for a woman with co-occurring issues.

As we worked on the articles as peers I realized that I was also sharing a lot of my own story with the women. I had told my own recovery story in previous issues of the journal, and it is not a secret at my agency that I am a woman in recovery with a diagnosis of bi-polar. However, as we continued to work on these articles as a group I wondered if I was crossing lines of professionalism and ethics by revealing so much of my own story with these women. I remembered professors in my Master’s program telling me you never reveal any personal information, but then I remembered the lax atmosphere of a clubhouse where I worked before finishing my undergraduate degree. So I asked myself, which was right? And then I asked myself a bigger question: When sitting with this group of women, am I a staff person or a peer? Am I the professional or just another woman in a group of women with co-occurring issues? And am I part of this group of peers? I knew I had found my answer: I am part of this group of peers. I am not above this group of women, but beside them. I am them.

Psych rehab has come far and we now have peer specialists in many domains. However, we still talk about how much is too much to share with clients and there are still professors who believe it is unprofessional to share any personal information with a client. Often peer specialists are marginalized where they work and often feel out of the loop of the other “professionals.” I think now is the time for us to look at having peer specialists, not just in entry level positions, but in positions all over agencies. We should have peer specialists embedded into our programs rather than as a free standing program. I think that case managers, counselors, supervisors, and even directors and therapists and psychiatrists could be peer specialists. We have spent a long time in our field arguing over book taught versus lived experience, and those of us with lived experience have usually been on the losing end of this argument. But now as we look to the next step in client-centered treatment and services, I think it is time for those of us who have both, the letters after our name and the lived experience, to come out of the shadows and shout that there is not an “us” and “them” – that some of us are on both sides of that fence and that we are no longer ashamed of having a diagnosis, no longer afraid of losing our jobs because we have a diagnosis, and we are no longer silent!