Starting Monday, May 17, Wichita State University's Center for Community Support and Research (CCSR) will host a 5 Day Intentional Peer Support (IPS) Training with mental health consumer activist Shery Mead.

According to Mead, peer support is traditionally defined as people with common experience coming together to aid each other by sharing coping strategies and authentic empathy through shared life experience. Peer support can be a powerful tool, especially in the mental health community, as a way to engage mutual relationships of hope and healing. 

IPS is a framework for exploring how we come to know what we know — in other words, listening for and asking questions about the life experiences that shape worldview. IPS focuses on relationship as a process of helping one another move toward what one wants his or her life to be about.  It does this by introducing participants to:

• The four tasks (connection, worldview, mutual responsibility and moving toward)

• Listening with intention

• Understanding trauma worldview and trauma re-enactment

• Using co-supervision as a tool to maintain values in action

Mead is an internationally recognized writer and researcher whose work in Trauma-Informed Peer Support has helped shape alternatives to psychiatric hospitalization through peer-run crisis respite. Mead has provided support and new perspective to countless consumers, survivors and ex-patients in the mental health community, and is thrilled to share her work in the upcoming 5 Day Intentional Peer Support Training.

This training is open to any individual who has experienced a psychiatric diagnosis and is working to use their experience as a catalyst to fuel change in others. Applications and additional information can be found on CCSR's Web site at www.wichita.edu/ccsr.