What is Peer Support?

What Is Peer Support?

Peer support is a form of emotional and practical support offered by someone with lived experience of mental health challenges and recovery. It is built on mutual respect, shared understanding, and the belief that people are experts in their own lives.

The roots of peer support come from the psychiatric survivor and consumer movements of the 1960s and 1970s, when people with lived experience began supporting one another outside of traditional medical models. These early peer-led initiatives were based on the idea that connection, dignity, choice, and shared experience could be just as powerful as clinical intervention. Over time, peer support has become an established and recognized component of modern mental health systems, while still maintaining its core values of autonomy, empowerment, and mutuality. Unlike therapy or clinical services, peer support is non-diagnostic, non-hierarchical, and non-directive. It is not about being treated or fixed. Instead, it focuses on listening, connection, and collaboration, creating space for honest conversation without judgement, labels, or pressure.

How Peer Support Can Help

Peer support can be helpful in many real and practical ways, including:

• Feeling understood
  Talking with someone who has lived through similar challenges can reduce isolation and help you feel less alone in your experiences.

• Navigating mental health systems
  Peer support can help you prepare for appointments, understand your options, and build confidence in advocating for your own needs.

• Coping with distress or overwhelming  situations
  During difficult moments, peer support offers grounding, emotional presence, and space to reflect — without rushing to solutions.

• Supporting recovery on your own terms
  Peer support encourages you to define recovery for yourself, whether that involves stability, meaning, connection, or personal growth.

• Managing life transitions
  Peer support can be especially helpful during times of change such as relationship shifts, housing changes, grief, or identity transitions.

• Building confidence and self-trust
  Through shared experience and reflective conversation, peer support can help strengthen self-advocacy, resilience, and self-belief.

Peer support does not replace therapy, medical care, or emergency services. Instead, it complements other forms of support and stands on its own as a powerful, human-centred approach rooted in empathy, equality, and hope.

At its heart, peer support is about walking alongside someone — not leading, fixing, or directing — and supporting people in finding their own way forward.

Support is available in Hamilton, Ontario, with virtual options available by arrangement.

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