Suying Ang
Early Psychosis Intervention Programme, Institute of Mental Health
Ang Suying is a Senior Case Manager/Team Leader at the Department of Early Psychosis Intervention in Institute of Mental Health. Her interest lies in the provision of recovery-oriented practices through peer involvement. She is leading a peer support initiative, creating opportunities for peer connections and sustaining efficacy of peer support specialists.
This paper seeks to examine the nature of peer involvement in Singapore’s Early Psychosis Intervention Programme (EPIP). Peer involvement surfaced from the mental health service user movement since the 1970s in the US, leading to the rise of peer support services (Davidson, Bellamy, Guy, & Miller, 2012). Service users, or peers, have increasingly been empowered to participate in mental health services. The agenda of user participation has been formalised in policy terms in the West (Tait & Lester, 2005), thus underscoring its importance.
Peer involvement is at its infancy in Singapore. Since 2009, EPIP pioneered user participation within the Institute of Mental Health, Singapore’s only tertiary mental health institution, with the provision of an honorarium for peers to contribute to services through peer support. This has evolved into a current initiative called Peers4Rs (Remembering Resilience, Respect and Recovery) that looks at fostering collaborations between professionals and service users, to promote recovery-oriented messages and advocate for mental health issues within EPIP.
The first part of the paper will describe the range of involvement that EPIP peers undertake, like providing peer support, doing public outreach and engagement or giving service development inputs. They have also embarked on involvement in clinical education and research. Meaningful peer involvement will be deliberated upon under factors of timing of involvement, power dynamics, financial compensation, organisational culture, wellness of peers, capacity building and development of “critical mass”, that were identified by Jones (2015).
As the development of the local peer involvement has been largely initiated with support of mental health professionals, the author will further reflect on elements that helped or hindered the process of implementing peer involvement from a ‘top-down’ approach. Though seemingly paradoxical, the author will demonstrate through examples that co-creation can still take place for real change to happen.
Influencing managers , Peer support , Experts by experience
