The impact of life story work during peer worker training: Identity reconstruction, social connection, and recovery.

IF 1.8 3区医学 Q3 PSYCHIATRY Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal Pub Date : 2025-02-13 DOI:10.1037/prj0000639

Rikke Amalie Agergaard Jensen, Signe Lehn Brand, Tine Holm, Mike Slade, Dorthe Kirkegaard Thomsen

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Objective: Personal recovery has become a guiding vision in mental health care, and peer workers play a key role in assisting individuals on their recovery journey. As a component of training to prepare for this role, peer workers need to engage with their own life story, in order to support recovery in both them and in the service users they will assist. The purpose of the present study was to explore the impact of life story work on peer workers.

Method: Fifteen individuals training to be peer workers were interviewed to explore the impact of telling and listening to life stories. Reflexive thematic analysis involving two analysts was conducted.

Results: Three main themes were identified: (a) life story work as identity reconstruction, (b) social connection through life story sharing, and (c) negative impacts of engaging with life stories in peer worker training. Each theme was connected to a number of subthemes.

Conclusions and implications for practice: Life story work can both facilitate personal recovery in peer workers during their training and aid them in utilizing their stories in their future peer worker roles. Training needs to prepare peer workers to deal with the future role-related challenges of life story work. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

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来源期刊

Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal Multiple-

CiteScore

3.80

自引率

5.30%

发文量

期刊介绍： The Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal is sponsored by the Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation, at Boston University"s Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences and by the US Psychiatric Rehabilitation Association (USPRA) . The mission of the Psychiatric Rehabilitation Journal is to promote the development of new knowledge related to psychiatric rehabilitation and recovery of persons with serious mental illnesses.