My essay, “Peer Support Futures” has been published in The Perch, an open-access (free to read) creative arts mental health journal, published by the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health.

Read “Peer Support Futures” online

This paper is based on my previous major research paper “Dreaming Peer Support Futures“, and is an exploration of the discipline of peer support through a lens of futurity and utopia. It outlines how futures thinking has always been at the heart of mental health peer support, both in terms of its social movement origins (as dreams and demands for a better world) and contemporary practices (through the peer support value of “hope”). It frames “recovery” as the reclamation of self-determination over our own futures, as well as privileges lost through psychiatrization. Lastly, it aims to trouble the dominant (white/Western) “origin story” of mental health peer support, highlight its impact on the present, and encourage the dreaming of alternative peer support futures grounded within diverse peer knowledges and lineages.