The Power of Peer Support: A Radical Shift in Mental Healthcare

What Is Peer Support?  

Peer support is a mutual-aid model of care in which people with shared lived experiences provide emotional, social, and practical support to one another. Unlike Western colonial mental health systems that position professionals as the sole authorities on healing, peer support values lived experience as a source of wisdom. It operates on principles of solidarity, empowerment, and collective care, offering an alternative to hierarchical and often exclusionary models of care. (1)

Historically, peer-led support has been a lifeline for oppressed communities, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, disabled, neurodivergent, Queer, and Trans individuals. It fosters healing through relationships built on trust, shared identity, and nonjudgmental understanding—qualities often missing in institutional mental health settings.  

Challenging the Western Colonial Mental Health System

A.K.A White Supremacy

Western mental health systems are deeply rooted in colonialism and white supremacy, pathologizing behaviors and identities that don’t fall into white, cis-heteronormative, and able-bodied norms. (2) Psychiatry and psychology have long been tools of control used to criminalize Black and Indigenous resistance, enforce gender conformity, and silence disabled individuals. (3)

Peer support disrupts this model by rejecting the pathologizing of distress. It recognizes that mental health struggles are often the result of systemic oppression (e.g., racism, transphobia) rather than individual pathology. Instead of forcing people to conform to rigid diagnostic categories, peer support centers the lived realities of those who have been historically silenced and harmed by the mental health industrial complex.  

How Peer Support Helps Communities  

Peer support strengthens communities in ways that clinical approaches often fail to do, including:  

1. Fostering Collective Healing 

Traditional therapy can be isolating, centering individual healing over collective healing. It also often identifies ways in which the individual must change in response to oppressive systems as opposed to pushing for change and dismantling these systems. Peer support offers spaces where people can find solidarity, resources, and mutual support as they heal together.

2. Reducing Barriers to Care

Access to licensed mental health care is expensive and often inaccessible. Peer support operates outside of these financial barriers, making healing available to all. In many cases, this type of support operates on a pay-what-you-can basis or low-cost models. 

3. Validating Lived Experience

Many people from historically oppressed groups experience medical gaslighting and discrimination in Western colonial mental health settings. Peer support ensures that people’s realities are affirmed rather than dismissed and honors the wisdom and resourcing that comes from lived experiences.4  

4. Building Self-Determination

Peer support helps people reclaim agency over their healing, offering tools and strategies that are self-directed rather than imposed by an external authority. This type of care is also anti-carceral and outside of state control, meaning peer supporters are not mandated to call the police when a participant is in crisis or facing suicidal ideation. This reduces the potential harm and violence caused by police or psychiatric incarceration for the care seeker. 

How Licensed Therapists Can Engage With Peer Support  

While this type of care challenges the authority of licensed mental health professionals, it doesn’t have to exist in opposition to them. Therapists who are committed to justice-based care can play a role in uplifting peer-led healing by:

• Validating Peer Support Models: Acknowledge the legitimacy of non-clinical healing spaces and avoid positioning therapy as the only path to well-being.  
• Offering Resources Without Gatekeeping: Provide tools, referrals, and knowledge without enforcing a hierarchical relationship.  
• Challenging Internalized Professionalism: Question biases that prioritize academic training over lived experience or position the therapist as the expert on the individual’s healing.
• Funding and Supporting Peer-Led Initiatives: Advocate for peer-run programs and ensure they receive adequate resources.  

How Peer Support Disrupts Fascism  

Fascism thrives on control, hierarchy, and silencing dissent. It relies on systems that force people to comply through fear, punishment, and the suppression of autonomy. Unfortunately, many aspects of the Western mental health system reflect these same dynamics—defining what is “normal,” labeling those who struggle as “disordered,” and often punishing people rather than supporting them.

Peer support disrupts this. It’s built on mutual care, community power, and the radical idea that people are the experts in their own healing. Instead of reinforcing hierarchies where professionals hold all the authority, peer support values lived experience and shared wisdom. It redistributes power, offering healing on our own terms rather than through rigid institutions that often do more harm than good.