What is a 'peer professional'?

Dr Mike Slade: The peer professional is a new role. And it's a new and distinct job type in the mental health system, for which personal or lived experience of mental illness is a job requirement. In that sense, it's quite a different role to the other roles in the mental health system.

We're  learning from international studies that there are many potential benefits. One benefit, and in some ways the easiest to understand, is that if you're a mental health service user coming into a system where everyone else appears very well, all the people and the staff that you meet seem to have no problems at all, it can inadvertently reinforce that sense of not managing, not coping. If, by contrast, one of the people you meet talks open about an experience of mental illness and the way they found a way forward from it, that can be an inspiring role model of recovery.

But also there are other benefits. The first is for people who use mental health services and have found their own journey of recovery has started – it can provide a pathway back into work, where their experience, instead of becoming a vulnerability or something they need to hide, is actively valued. And that in itself can be transformative, as people develop a new understanding about their experiences and essentially don't see it as all bad, and can identify benefits of what they have been through.

But finally, and in a way most difficult to quantify and yet potentially most powerful, is the impact on the mental health system.

When mental health services employ people who can talk openly about their experience of mental illness, as employees, then it becomes much harder to hold very strong sense of 'them and us' differences between the people who work in the system and the people who use the system. So it's a powerful and very naturalist approach to addressing stigmatising beliefs that can be held in the system. For example, where mental health health professionals may have inadvertently low expectations of what's possible for the people they are working with, it's challenged in a very natural and inoffensive way by a colleague sitting next door to them and saying: 'I was once in hospital and look at me now. So it can have a powerful impact on the culture of the mental health service as well as the benefit for individual people.'