The Power of Peer Support

Lived experience matters.

Peer Support: A Real Route To Representation

I never met anyone like me after I had my stroke. I didn’t look like any of the other survivors I met. I felt like I was the odd one out at every clinic. I felt completely alone.

In fact, it wasn’t until I attended a stroke conference many months after I began my recovery journey that I finally met someone whose story was anything like mine. And it was around that time that I read something that has stayed with me. “They can measure your walk, but they can’t measure your why.”

And that really struck a chord for me. What often matters most in recovery can’t be recorded in a file. And sometimes the people who understand that best are the ones who’ve lived it too.

This is why peer support is crucial. Recovery doesn’t live in formal paperwork or well-meaning leaflets, but in the chatter of coffee shops and the moments of mutual recognition. It’s someone saying, “Yes! It’s the same for me!” and meaning it. And it’s why survivor visibility matters so much – and why we need to have circles of survivors who represent every part of life.

More than Symbolic Inclusion

Mental health and stroke services are increasingly recognising the value of lived experience. More organisations are hiring peer workers, people with personal experience of illness, trauma, or recovery, and using words like “recovery-oriented.” That’s progress. As long as it’s more than a token gesture.

Because you can only change a system with real representation. Peer inclusion needs to be genuine, not performative.

Representation isn’t about having one person with lived experience on a panel or a pamphlet. It’s about embedding those voices throughout the system. Not as add-ons, but as equal partners.

What Peer Support Really Offers

Peer support isn’t a new concept. it came out of the survivor movement in the 1970s as a way of reclaiming voice and agency. As a way for people with shared experience to support each other in ways professionals without that experience often can’t.

There are many names for it. Peer supporters, peer workers, peer specialists. But what defines it isn’t the label. It’s the feeling - the sense that “you’re not alone” and there is someone out there who really gets it. It’s not about giving advice or offering clinical answers. Instead it’s about listening, understanding and being able to connect on level that only survivors can understand.

I really do believe that organisations that hire peer workers are moving in the right direction, but hiring alone isn’t the goal. Change comes from shifts in culture where peer supporters aren’t just there to meet an DEI quota but instead are sounding boards, partners and leaders.

It means paying them properly, valuing their expertise, offering supervision that recognises the emotional toll of the work, seeing lived experience as a form of knowledge, not a story to include in marketing.

When peer workers are empowered, everyone benefits.

What Works?

We just need people who can talk to us on our level, about our shared frustrations and successes. We need to be heard and seen for the things that are going wrong and for all our hopes for the future.