News & Events
Community is first of all a quality of the heart. It grows from the spiritual knowledge that we are alive not for ourselves but for one another.
Henri Nouwen
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Acceptability of Peer Support for People With Schizophrenia in Chennai, India: A Cross Sectional Study Amongst People With Lived Experience, Caregivers, and Mental Health Professionals
Establishing structured peer support in mental health, particularly for people with schizophrenia, as a psychosocial intervention is early in low and middle-income countries like India. Before implementing and understanding the effectiveness of peer support service and which mode of peer support delivery will be suitable for our culture, our study aimed to understand if peer […]
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What Makes Intentional Unidirectional Peer Support for Homeless People Work? An Exploratory Analysis Based on Clients’ and Peer Workers’ Perceptions
Homeless people are increasingly supported by peer workers in one-on-one mentorship relations, called intentional unidirectional peer support (IUPS). Intentional unidirectional peer support refers to “a formalized mentorship type of peer intervention where the peer is clearly more advanced and is mentoring the client in an organized fashion” (Barker et al., 2020). Research investigating the effectiveness […]
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The Best of Both Worlds”: Experiences of young people attending groups co-facilitated by peer workers and clinicians in a youth mental health service
Peer Support is an emerging discipline within mental health services (Slade et al., 2014), providing opportunities for positive role modelling and peer influence (Faulkner & Basset, 2012). The embodiment of recovery by peer workers disrupts for service users the “chronicity of their patient role” (p. 884) reinforced by models of care focusing on symptom reduction and illness […]
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Traumatic, long path to change
For five long years, survivors of abuse at the hands of Dunedin clergy have waited to see if a reminder of the city’s dark past would be removed. The news that they had succeeded was greeted with relief, but the handling of the investigation into Bishop John Kavanagh has come under fire. PIJF reporter Daisy […]
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One in six Australian university students say they have been sexually harassed. How can this be stopped?
Australian university students have shared harrowing stories of sexual harassment and assault in a damning new report that shows the prevalence of these incidents at institutions across the country. In what was labelled a “difficult day” for the university sector, a study of almost 44,000 students released on Wednesday found that one in six students […]
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Kavanagh College to be renamed
Dunedin’s Kavanagh College will be renamed after an investigation found its namesake failed to take appropriate action over claims of abuse. The school will become Trinity Catholic College from January 1, 2023, the Bishop of Dunedin saying the church had previously let survivors down badly. The change has been welcomed, but the time it took, […]
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Abuse in care: Māori survivors faced ‘significant racism, torture’
Māori survivors of abuse in care want urgent change to Aotearoa’s care and protection system, which has seen whānau suffer significant racism, torture, slave labour and disconnection from whakapapa, an inquiry has heard. For the past two weeks, ngā mōrehu (survivors) have been giving evidence as part of a special hearing for Māori in the […]
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Embracing Māoritanga helping state care abuse survivors heal
Māori abused in state care have spoken about the violent environments they were placed in as children, and how embracing their Māoritanga, their cultural identity, has helped them on their healing journey. Friday was the fifth day in a hearing for Māori survivors in Auckland as part of the ongoing Royal Commission of Inquiry into […]
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Someone Who Has Been in My Shoes”: The Effectiveness of a Peer Support Model for Providing Support to Partners, Family and Friends of Child Sexual Abuse Material Offenders
This article details an evaluation of PartnerSPEAK, an organization in Victoria, Australia, that supports the non-offending partners, family and friends of CSAM offenders. PartnerSPEAK is the only support service of its kind in Australia, and one of only a few internationally. PartnerSPEAK utilizes a peer support model in which previous clients of PartnerSPEAK, who have […]
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Marylands School abuse: How a tiny religious order in Christchurch became an outsized scandal
Abuse of children at Marylands School in Christchurch was so rife it was described as a state-supported, church-run brothel for paedophiles. But so far the spotlight has focused on a handful of individual abusers. An inquiry this week tried to find out how deep the rot went. Alan Nixon nearly had to burn a church […]
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Church fixer’s damning revelations: 21 out of 23 St John of God brothers faced allegations of physical or sexual abuse
Damning revelations from a former church fixer reveals that almost all St John of God Catholic brothers faced allegations of physical or sexual abuse. Steve Kilgallon reports. In 2002, Sydney clinical psychologist Michelle Mulvihill made 13 trips to New Zealand; visits which took her the entire length of the country. It wasn’t a pleasant experience: […]
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An Update of Peer Support/Peer Provided Services Underlying Processes, Benefits, and Critical Ingredients
The purpose of this article is to delineate the current state-of-the-knowledge of peer support following the framework employed in the 2004 article (Solomon, Psychiatr Rehabil J. 2004;27(4):392–401 1). A scoping literature was conducted and included articles from 1980 to present. Since 2004, major growth and advancements in peer support have occurred from the development of new specializations […]