For Global Peer Support Celebration Day, we interviewed DBSA Peer Specialist Trainer, Jean Dukarski, to learn more about her journey as a Peer Specialist and trainer.
Can you share your journey with peer support and how you became involved with DBSA?
I got my first job working as a peer in 1992, before peer support was even a thing. I got it after I was fired from yet another job. My friend, who knew about my mental health history, knew about this peer-run organization and was nagging me to apply. I filled out most of the application until the last question: “How do you define mental illness?”
After much procrastination and maybe some attempted self-sabotage, I finally wrote something about thinking diagnoses and labels were all BS, not knowing at the time that this was exactly what would qualify me for the job. Helping people live beyond their labels was in line with my views.
I have worked in the Peer Specialists’ space before it was even called that. I remember when they brought peer specialists into Michigan. I asked who these “yahoos” were coming up from Georgia, talking about Peer Specialists. Fast forward to today, I am a Peer Specialist trainer with DBSA and Appalachian Consulting Group.
I first got involved with DBSA when they were awarded the contract with the Veterans Administration (VA) and needed trainers to train 300 vets in year one. Compared to Appalachian Consulting Group, which is more local to a state, DBSA is so cool because it involves people from all over. You have people from California and New York all in the same training. It’s people who would have never interacted with each other being brought into one room together. There were times when there were veterans and non-veterans in a group. People come into groups thinking they cannot relate to each other, and through the training, they find they have so much more in common.
I have a passion for DBSA’s support group concept. I see an overlap with that of the substance abuse community and the mental health community. The substance community has such a great recovery support system, and I do not think the mental health community is there yet. I see DBSA as making progress to change that.
What has been your most rewarding experience working with peers?
There was a gentleman in another state who I believe sums up what peer support means to folks. He had an outstanding warrant for his arrest in another state that he was avoiding. After he went through Peer Specialist training, he went back to own up to the warrant. He served 3 months of jail time.
After serving his time, he posted on Facebook about how he had been in and out of jail a few times, but this time was different. This time, there was a career waiting for him—a career that would not exclude him because of his record.
This year, we celebrate 25 years of peer support as a medical billing service. Ike Powell is the gentleman who originally wrote the Peer Specialists’ curriculum. He worked in poor communities in India and Sudan. They asked him to help with peer support research, and he found that people with behavioral health issues feel just as disenfranchised as the poor nations he visited.
Some people use the Peer Specialist training to get a job or for their own personal experience. The key to recovery is to help people find meaning and purpose. I think one of the takeaways individuals have from Peer Specialist training is finding meaning and purpose.
How do you see the role of peer support evolving in the future?
There are still some places that struggle to make peer support effective. In the beginning, I do not think the system itself realized where it could be effective. Peer support was showing up in case management roles, but Peer Specialists can be used in all fields, including hospitals, jails, employment agencies, housing establishments, and much more. Colleges have hired Peer Specialists to help students go to school for the first time. There is really not a place where Peer Specialists cannot work.
For the future, I do worry about peer drift. I could see us moving away from the recovery model nationally and focusing on a billable data model. It is hard with stigma, aka prejudice and discrimination, that still exists. An institution-run model versus a peer-run model might label individuals as “those people who need taking care of.” Do we help people so much that we disable them?
For those considering becoming peer specialists, what advice would you offer?
It is just the most rewarding thing you can do. I still work part-time for the organization that hired me in 1992 because I love watching people find meaning and purpose in their lives. Peer support is just about believing in people and supporting them to believe in themselves. It can be so powerful to pour hope into a person. Something so simple can change the world.
How has DBSA’s community helped you in your own mental health journey?
I am still making connections as a trainer. It can be easy when you are doing well to lose track of your recovery community. As a Peer Specialist, I get to see what recovery looks like for all different people. This reminds me of journeys I have seen over the years, like a man who got sober playing chess. Or the individuals I have met who had the guts to write about their experiences. All these stories inspire me, being able to witness other people in their recovery.
I was terrified at the beginning of the pandemic when the world shut down. What would I do because facilitating meetings fed my recovery? The state asked for and received some funding to start a peer run warm line to be there for folks during the shutdown. We had two weeks to get it up and running, which included hiring 22 people. The day we opened, the Michigan governor announced our number in a press release, and we received over 600 calls in the first hour. Many people calling during that first hour were looking for COVID-19 information, but we kept the warm line open for 1.5 years.
In the spirit of World Mental Health Day and the theme of Mental Wellness in the Workplace that we observed last week, how do you balance work and life?
Self-care. You need something more than just work. I worry a lot about how peer support can become a peer’s new addiction. When I was working the warm line, sometimes the first thing a person would say when I answered was, “Do not give me a breathing exercise or tell me to take a bath.” Those are some of the things we think about when we say self-care, but that does not have to be the case. Sometimes, self-care is going out and working hard at something. It can be doing something different and getting out of your head. Self-care days do not have to be a pity party.
For me, self-care can be indulging in my hobbies, including peyote beading and blacksmithing, to help me go beyond work and the labels. Or I like to go watch my grandkids play football. When I am on the sideline, I find myself watching the football coach trying to coach a number of toddlers running around. I think about how they have their day jobs, and then they come here to mentor little ones and give their lives meaning and purpose. That is what you need outside of work. You need to figure out whatever that meaning and purpose is for you.
We need something outside of the peer support community; otherwise, we are never going to change the experience of the “chronically normal.” We need to have peers out in real life. I was on a plane with a man one time, and I was explaining to him what I do. He commented that I was “recycling people.” In a way, Peer Specialists can take someone who was thrown away by society and make them into something beautiful. After talking to this man for the whole flight about peer support, at the very end, when we were deboarding, he told me his mom had received Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). The fact that he waited until the end of our time together says that we still have work to do.
How do you plan to celebrate Global Peer Support Celebration Day?
I had not thought of it before. I think I will reach out to someone I trained in Louisiana. I might also reach out to some of the folks I trained in other states and ask them what they are doing now. As a trainer, you do not always get to see what the follow-up is for our students. I think it would be good to know what they are doing now.
Thank you for all that you do, Jean!
Learn more about Peer Specialists and DBSA’s Peer Specialist Course.
