EDCMA

Description

Peer support involves a person in recovery from a mental health condition supporting others in their recovery journey. It is based within the recovery-oriented care paradigm, where the aim is to enable a person to live a life they wish to lead despite their symptoms. It foregrounds lived experience, employs positive self-disclosure, promotes hope and empowerment, focuses on improvement in psycho-social outcomes, and aims to move away from a purely biomedical view of recovery that solely focuses on clinical symptomology. While it is a promising intervention, it remains poorly evidenced. Most of the research evaluation comes from high income country contexts, with limited research and evidence from low-middle-income country contexts.

Given the growing importance of peer support internationally, there is a need to explore the practice of peer support that has the potential to positively impact a number of recovery-related outcomes that may not be achieved using clinical interventions alone. This is especially useful for low-resource contexts where peer support can bridge the large mental health care gap, play a key role in promoting recovery, and offers a cost-effective solution. The seminar will share research and practice-related questions on the impact of a peer support intervention on a rights-based and recovery-oriented approach by discussing examples from one of the more recent multi-country trials on peer support; a health systems reform initiative; in addition to a large rural community intervention to set the context of peer support. In addition to the diverse settings, the examples will also cover a range of mental health conditions and their related facilitators and barriers. The seminar will also discuss next steps and future pathways for peer support.

PLEASE NOTE THAT THIS IS A HYBRID EVENT (IN-PERSON AND ONLINE).

INTERESTED IN ATTENDING ONLINE? FOLLOW THIS LINK TO REGISTER

The Speaker

Ms Jasmine Kalha is Progam Manager and Research Fellow at the Centre for Mental Health, Law and Policy in Pune, India.

Jasmine is trained in social work from a gender perspective from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and has an MPhil in Sociology from the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University. She has worked on implementing innovative research interventions at scale for mental health and human rights in low resource settings since 2014.

She co-leads the scale-up of Atmiyata, a large rural community-led intervention to reduce mental health care and social care gap. She was the site lead for UPSIDES (peer support) project in Gujarat, and is involved with the capacity building initiatives for suicide prevention. Previously, Jasmine worked on health systems reform through WHO’s QualityRights initiative.