No, recovery and peer support go hand in hand in lucky cases.

JMIR Ment Health. 2020 Jun; 7(6): e15572.

doi: 10.2196/15572

Peer Support in Mental Health: Literature Review

Monitoring Editor: John Torous

Reviewed by Faraaz Mahomed and Karen Machin

Thankyou Beatrice. I read some results of the review that you shared connected to my question!!!

"PSWs experience different problems alongside their diverse job roles, including low pay, stigma, unclear work roles, alienation, struggling with skill deficits, lack of training opportunities, emotional stress in helping others, and, on top of that, maintaining their personal physical and mental health wellness [100,101]. Researchers found that PSWs experience discrimination and prejudice from nonpeer workers, in addition to the encountered difficulties of how to manage the transition from being a patient to a PSW. As a result, high attrition rates were noted among PSWs in mental health settings [102,103]. Peer job satisfaction is strongly dependent on several factors [100,104,105]"...

Hi Andrea. Peer support can contribute to personal recovery. The generative mechanism could be "embodied hope".

If you meet a person who have had similar painfull experiences as you have, and have recovered, then you can easier believe, that it is possible for you to recover.

I agree with your comment, but I was thinking about the peer to peer worker perspective. If I work with people with my similar past experiences with medical treatment, pain, lonely.... I will be daily connected with that....While the recovery concept (theorically) goes toward the aim about "to forget" the illness

Working with people who are in recovery will provide more support and hope for patients in recovery, and this will enhance their self-esteem and instill hope to make them believe that it is possible to heal.

Peer support builds confidence and hope for healing.” Indeed, in a meta-study, Dr Daniela Fuhr and colleagues found that peers have the potential to deliver care to persons with serious mental illness that can result in improved quality of life as a result of such increases in hope.

https://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/home/topics/general-psychiatry/exploring-the-value-of-peer-support-for-mental-health/

Stephen I. Ternyik I do think you have an important point. Ultimately a full recovery must depend on an individual taking full responsibility for their own mental health. Getting to the point where the person can take that responsibility might take much medical intervention and support.

I do think a major advance in this field would be a deeper understanding of how the brain works that can be understood by everyone. It is a particular combination of biology, chemistry and physics which has to be applied to the problem.

I have made my best efforts to show the way in this field and the result is to be found here:

Preprint The Conscious Brain

Richard

All your comments are very interesting. Thank you so much. However, I am looking for some work that has studied exactly the relationship that I indicated in my initial question to this discussion. Without leaving the specific topic, it seems to me that this research question needs to be investigated. I still do not find in the scientific literature the analysis of the impact that working supporting other people with mental illness can have on workers with mental illness, objectively or subjectively considering their sense of recovery.

You may benefit from our paper where we discuss that helping is not allowed and its aftermath.

Peer support can, as mentioned, can be very helpful in recovery but there can be negative consequences. If drug abuse has been a problem along with the mental issues and the person gets support from those peers it may not be a positive path.

thanks Beatrice. In some way, professional decisions related to the care of people, and their consequences, are all connected to a bioethical issue. So your work is surely a good example of possible argument developments for the topic of this discussion. Thanks for sharing.

Peer support can be helpful but the definition of the nature of the support eventually needs clarification and discussion with the therapist. It is the safest way to filter the help.

In this edition the role of peer support is described with precision. Even if this edition concerns elder patients and their relatives, in a larger spectrum, there are precious reflexions for a variety of mental affections.

Peer Support is very imperative for people in recovery because it strengthens their recovery and helps them rebuild more self-efficacy in the management of their conditions and adherence to their medications.

Andrea, I have to challenge the idea that recovery is about "forgetting" an illness, and propose that it is more about "accepting" the illness. To "forget" would be akin to denial and counterproductive, allowing for blind spots and threats relapse. Acceptance would be to always be aware of the condition, and learn coping mechanisms to help deal with the real world affects in your everyday life. As an example, a recovering alcoholic never forgets that he is an alcoholic. He must be constantly aware so that he can avoid triggering situations. In this regard, support groups reinforce that. I believe your initial question is based on a fallacy, and I don't think you will find any research supporting it. You can't "forget" being an alcoholic, bipolar, or schizophrenic.

Leonidas Argyropoulos "Turning" the focus of attention from the disease to other things does not mean "forgetting". Please, re-read my question more carefully. In addition, you can review the recovery model of Jacobson & Greenley (2001), at the points of "hope" and "social relationships" as necessary internal conditions. Alternatively, there is the Andresen model (Andrsen et al., 2003), which establishes the importance of the person's identity not being identified solely with the mental disorder. In addition, there are important studies in this direction such as (Davidson et al., 2008; Leamy et al., 2011). The lack of studies, perhaps in this case, is because the problem has never been raised from the perspective of workers with mental disorders supporting other people with mental disorders. The fact of working is an integrating factor that opens up many possibilities. But, in relation to the previous topics, what effects does working every day with people who have the same disorder have on the quality of work life and sense of recovery of people?