Market Testing - Peer support, mild-moderate perinatal mental health services

1. Overview The Council is reviewing its peer support service for mild-moderate perinatal mental health needs. The service is primarily aimed at delivering emotional and practical support to parents who may be experiencing mild-moderate anxiety, social isolation and/or depression, antenatally and in their infant's first years of life (first 1001 days). The current service provision is due to end in September 2021. What is peer support? Peer Support may be defined as the help and support that people with lived experience of a mental illness are able to give to one another. Peer support is distinct from other forms of social support in that the source of support is a peer, a person who is similar in fundamental ways to the recipient of the support; their relationship is one of equality. It may be social, emotional or practical support but importantly this support is mutually offered and reciprocal, built on shared personal experience and empathy and allows peers to benefit from the support whether they are giving or receiving it. Research has shown that peer-run self-help which works towards the individual's wellbeing and recovery, yields improvement in psychiatric symptoms resulting in decreased clinical input, larger social support networks and enhanced self-esteem and social functioning. What is helpful in delivering peer support? A review of the evidence from studies that have looked into the impact of peer support on PNMH indicate that women want to access peer support but need to have somewhere that is safe for them to be themselves, to talk openly about how they feel; somewhere for their voices to be heard. For the women in the studies, the search for a peer environment in which they could be honest about how they felt was an essential part of the search for understanding and validation. The importance of the most helpful type of peer support - which acknowledges their perinatal mental Illness and its associated expression - therefore, is central to women getting the most benefit from this. Please complete the attached questionnaire by 5.00pm 26th February 2021 and return to: shema.begum@camden.gov.uk