Peer support is a most vital companion to clinical involvement in mental illness.
This is based on the proven assumption that only a peer – a person who knows what it’s like to live with an illness like bipolar disorder, depression, or schizophrenia – can truly understand and give healing comfort.
Medication and professional therapy both play a role, but the huge issues of stigma and understanding can only be fully dealt with at a peer level.
Then, there is research – that remote and academic endeavour that backstops so much of the care folks living with a mental illness receive.
But is all research so estranged from the human experience? Are the results of research confined to the pages of academic journals? I am glad to report that the answer is no, and that unique, multi-disciplinary work is being coordinated right here on the Coast. It is work that takes the power of peer involvement to heart.
Dr. Erin Michalak lives on the Coast and leads a UBC research team engaged in a courageous project that sets aside the safety of pure lab study and which creates a conversation between researchers, people living with mental illness, and those who have something to say.
In this small patch of editorial real estate, I can’t convey everything I find so good about what Dr. Michalak’s team does. I’ll just mention a few things you can find on the team’s website, at www.crestbd.ca and the companion page www.bdwellness.com
The extraordinary Victoria Maxwell, who lives on the Coast, is one of many research team members who lives with a mental illness. Maybe you have seen her one-woman shows. If not, you should. Victoria and her hugely funny, dire, inclusive take on life with bipolar disorder slays the dragon of stigma and conveys a message only a peer can do.
But also, Victoria’s work feeds back into the “pure” research world and provides information and unique knowledge unavailable to traditional studies in bipolar disorder.
The website www.bdwellness.com offers two things: a benefit to clients, and knowledge and information used by the research team. It is quite extraordinary.
Quality of life for folks living with bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses has been a very difficult matter to measure. In an interactive way – as a conversation – the resource on this site helps both clients and the research endeavour. For example, going into the Quality of Life questionnaire, a soul living with bipolar disorder can record daily subjective feelings and experiences and map those across the weeks and months. Further, this web tool provides information and knowledge about specific personal issues, and feeds back into the research team’s focus.
I would be wrong if I suggested that a given approach to research into mental illness could ever cause a guaranteed reduction in stigma or the abject misery that can attend life with bipolar. These are things that will always endure. But I am hopeful that a research trail is being blazed that will take advantage of a truism about human experience – that peer experience and understanding creates empathy and healing.
Please contact me at [email protected] if you would like to carry on this discussion.
