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Peer providers of mental health services use their personal illness and recovery narratives to help other mental health service users. Despite a substantial body of evidence supporting the effectiveness of these providers, little is known about the underlying strategies they employ in their professional practice. In this study, I used in-depth interviews with 23 peers to explore the most important practices they used in their day-to-day work with others. Results indicated that peers engaged in a reflexive process to strategically use their personal illness and recovery stories to help others re-story their life narratives. Peers also used communication strategies from motivational and cognitive–behavioral treatment approaches to engage, inspire, and mentor other service users. Findings suggest the need for research that further explores the rhetorical strategies used by peers using narrative methods. The development and testing of professional development opportunities to assist peers in maximizing their therapeutic potential are also warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harm reduction in community mental health settings can be effective in engaging persons with co-occurring disorders in services. In this qualitative study, personal interviews and grounded theory methods were used to explore the experiences of 21 mental health practitioners and 15 consumers with co-occurring disorders at a community mental health housing program that uses harm reduction. Results indicate that while harm reduction enhanced therapeutic alliances, ethical and emotional tensions between practitioners and consumers regarding their views on self-determination and tolerance of drug-related behaviors were also evident. These tensions are explored and implications for practice and education are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarship in the community mental health field has sought to understand the process of recovery from serious mental illness. Emphasis has been placed on the development and implementation of interventions designed to achieve concrete, professionally derived outcomes. Less emphasis has been placed on understanding how practitioners learn to implement evidence-based recovery-oriented practices over time and the tools that they use to develop such understandings. Because understanding learning and change are questions of both research and practice, it is important to develop tools suited for both. In this article, I make the case for using critical discourse analysis within a participatory action research framework—a merger that is analytically and theoretically salient and offers insights for practice in the field of community mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]