PACT Peer Specialist

Description

The Peer Specialist has experience as a recipient of mental health services and is willing to use and share their personal, practical experience, knowledge, and first-hand insight to benefit the team and its clients. The Peer Specialist functions as a fully integrated team member to provide expertise about the recovery process, symptom management, and the persistence required by clients to have a satisfying life.

They attend daily reports, participate fully in the assessment process, and typically work during the 9-5 hours (similar to the clinical team). The Peer Specialist collaborates to promote a team culture that recognizes, understands, and respects each client’s point of view, experiences, and preferences. They are responsible to maximize client choice, self-determination and decision-making in the planning, delivery and evaluation of treatment, rehabilitation and support services.

They provide peer counseling and consultation to individual clients, families, and team staff; act as a liaison with community resources; carry out rehabilitation and support functions; and assist in treatment, substance abuse services, education, support and consultation to families and crisis intervention under the clinical supervision of staff with professional degrees.

• Provide peer counseling and support, drawing on common experience as a peer, to validate clients’ experiences and to provide guidance and encouragement to clients to take responsibility and actively participate in their own recovery.
• Serve as a mentor to clients to promote hope and empowerment.
• Act as an interpreter to help non-mental health consumer team members better understand and empathize with each client’s unique and subjective experience and perceptions.
• Provide expertise and consultation from a mental health consumer perspective to the entire team concerning clients’ experiences on symptoms of mental illness, the effects and side-effects of medications, clients’ responses to and opinions of treatment, and clients’ experiences of recovery.
• Collaborate with the team to promote a team culture in which each client’s point of view, experiences, and preferences are recognized, understood and respected, and in which client self-determination and decision-making in treatment planning are maximized and supported.
• Help clients identify, understand, and combat stigma and discrimination associated with mental illness and develop strategies to reduce self-stigma.
• Help other team members identify and understand culture-wide stigma and discrimination against people with mental illness and develop strategies to eliminate stigma within the team.
• Collaborate with the team to ensure the protection of clients’ rights in order to help clients to improve their knowledge of client rights and grievance or complaint procedures.
• Increase awareness of and support client participation in consumer self-help programs and consumer advocacy organizations that promote recovery.
• Serve as the liaison between the team and consumer run programs such as self help groups, drop in centers, or other peer run organizations.
• Assist in the provision of ongoing assessment of clients’ mental illness symptoms and clients’ response to treatment. Suggest appropriate changes in treatment plans to ensure that immediate and appropriate interventions are provided in response to changes in clients’ mental status or behavior which puts clients at risk.
• Assist in the provision of direct clinical services to clients on an individual, group and family basis in the office and in community settings to teach symptom-management techniques and promote personal growth and development by assisting clients to cope with internal and external…