Programas de formación para el apoyo entre iguales en salud mental en España

Abstract

Mental health problems are a relevant issue all around the world. Mental illness affects one in four people throughout their lives, causing serious socio-economic and human rights-related consequences. In Spain, despite the progress made with psychiatric reform and the promotion of a community model, it is necessary to continue working to improve the quality of life of people with mental health problems. Education and peer support are highly recommended strategies to contribute to their social and occupational integration. Peer support is a relationship based on mutual support. It is established between two people: the person with mental health problems trained to provide the support and the person who receives it. This support enhances the recovery process. For this support to be effective, it is essential to previously train the person who will undertake the counselling functions. The relationship of support offers practical advice, suggestions, strategies and emotional and psychological support. In addition, maintaining an non-professional perspective is essential to help people to rebuild their sense of community after an unknown experience. Peer support brings benefits to all parties involved: support providers, receivers and implementing organizations or institutions. However, training programs for peer support are not widespread. In Spain, despite the recognition of the need to integrate people with mental health problems into society and to respond to their needs, there is no published research on guidelines for such training programs. For this reason, this research identifies the peer support training programs which have been or are being carried out in Spain and describe their formal characteristics. A bibliographic review of databases and web pages has been undertaken to identify Spanish experiences of training people with Severe Mental Disorder (SMD) based on peer support and to describe their formal characteristics (duration, methodology, evaluation and workplace). A total of 77 programs found in the electronic databases, 75 of which have been excluded as they are not Spanish experiences. Five programs were found in the searches carried out on the reports of conferences, congresses and websites of Spanish organizations and institutions. Finally, seven training experiences were selected for the group, five of them focused on peer support and others on the figure of the personal assistant. The study of the programs is carried out following the indications of the content analysis model. The training programs described have common objectives, however, they vary considerably in their approach, duration, names of support and evaluation providers and, to a lesser extent, in the contents, methodology and workplaces. Despite the expansion of peer support in mental health, the number of experiences found in Spain is limited. Any program must be adapted to the strengths of the individuals, the type of work, as well as to the needs of the community. Furthermore, if this new professional profile is regulated at work, it will contribute to improving the rates of social and occupational integration of people with mental health problems. It is necessary to continue developing and implementing experiences of these characteristics and to investigate their efficiency and effectiveness in order to be able to provide guidelines on peer support in the Spanish population.