Pathways Vermont is excited to announce the upcoming launch of a peer respite in Williston. To gain insights into this transformative initiative, we recently spoke with Shery Mead, a pioneering figure in the field who played a key role in establishing the first peer respite in the United States, located in New Hampshire. Shery is also the founder of Intentional Peer Support (IPS), an approach that fosters mutual help and connection.
Q&A:
Please tell us a little about yourself
Hi, my name is Shery Mead. I grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, where I had my first encounter with mental health treatment. (See IPS: A Personal Retrospective).
Tell us a little about Intentional Peer Support and what led you to start the organization
I started a peer support program in New Hampshire in 1995 and realized quickly that unless we defined what it was that we were doing, we would fall into “doing what had been done to us.” In other words, acting with each other the same way we had been treated in services. Telling each other what to do and how to do it. I realized that we needed training and opportunities for self-reflection. This developed into Intentional Peer Support.
Why is peer support important?
Intentional Peer support is a radically different approach to traditional help. It focuses on three principles. The first principle is learning together rather than helping. When we go in with the assumption that we are there to help, we start to see problems everywhere and don’t feel good unless we are solving them. When we put our attention on learning together, we become curious about how we have come to know what we know. We listen from a “position of not knowing,” and we explore our own worldview for bias and privilege.
The second principle is focusing on the relationship as opposed to focusing on the individual. This puts an emphasis on mutuality and both people learning and growing. It also moves us away from a” treatment mindset” and leads to honesty and authenticity.
The third principle is focusing on hope and possibility as opposed to focusing on fear. Fear too often drives coercion and, at the very least, leads to abuses of power. In IPS we talk about sharing risk and mutual responsibility for the relationship.
How did you get involved with opening the first peer respite in New Hampshire? Did you know much about peer respites before opening one?
I was running a peer support center, and the respite program was kind of a natural evolution of what we were doing. I had been working with the crisis hostel in Ithaca, NY, which was a research project studying a hospital alternative.
Why do you think it would be important to have more peer respites in Vermont?
With more peer respites, there is space for more people to avoid hospitalization. Sometimes, I’ve heard about people getting on waiting lists to get into peer respites, and I’m concerned that this can lead to people seeing themselves on a predictable timeline and beginning to see themselves as more “fragile.” I also worry that if we’re not careful, people may use the respite as a vacation, and then we lose our values and the intent of the respite.
Do you have a favorite memory or story of being involved in the peer respite?
A young man who had a long history of hospitalizations around psychotic experiences wanted to get through these times without being in the hospital and without increasing his medication. We talked in detail about the kinds of things we both were willing to sit with and what might feel intolerable. He was also studying eco-psychology and wanted to use our respite program as a structure for thinking about psychosis from that perspective.
The unfortunate time did come when he needed to use the program. His doctor advised him that taking the risk of not increasing his meds might lead to involuntary treatment, and he was told that he was much too vulnerable to go through this with his “peers.” In spite of this advice, my friend did use the respite program. He stayed up for four straight days talking to his peers, each person sharing their own similar experiences and unique perspectives. He and his peers also worked with the guidelines from his crisis plan so that they could remind each other of sharing in the responsibility. No one was afraid of “bizarre behaviors” or strange ways of thinking and no one told him what it meant.
After nine days of respite (with several days just catching up on sleep), he left respite…without increasing his medications and without forced treatment. After he left, he shared with us, “It was really terrific being with all different people who knew me in different ways and who all had their own versions of these kinds of experiences. Through all these conversations, I could take the things that were important to me and throw out the rest as just ‘crazy’ thinking. As I learn more about what happens for me and the kinds of things that feel important, I can begin to understand what kinds of events might contribute to these situations and what kinds of things might help me take a different path.”
