Living With Trauma: The Healers, 48

Anyone remember the short comedian, Rodney Dangerfield? Neither do I. I don't think I ever saw or heard him but he was famous for one particular little line. "I get no respect." I have often thought of making that our motto as peer support workers but none of our bosses like the idea. It cuts too close to the marrow, I would imagine. We have been ill, you know, and now we are seen as damaged goods. Yet from time to time they dust us off and cart us out and heap tons of praise on us, since this is all great PR and suddenly we are feted as the greatest thing in therapeutic interventions since psychotropic medications. Then, when no one's looking again, they shove us back into the closet and try to forget about us. But paying us a decent and living wage? What would we do with all that money? I mean besides enjoying housing options that aren't always government subsidized, being able to pay our rent on time every month, eat decently, have grocery options outside of No Frills, or the Food Dollarama, as I like to call it, have a bit of a life, a savings account, travel options for vacation time, decent and professionally presentable clothing, access to affordable dental care, all kinds of little things that our decently paid colleagues take for granted and don't seem to want to share with their poor damaged, not entirely well peer support partners. If our employers ran a delicatessen they would very quickly go out of business, and you know why? Because there is only so much that can be done with chopped liver. We, the peer support workers, are the chopped liver of the mental health profession. This is not an indication of how bad we are, by the way, but an indication of how good we are. They despise us for one simple reason. They are threatened by us. We do the job so much better than our professional counterparts despite all their many years of education and clinical training and for one simple reason. This job, to be done well, requires empathy, and lots of it. And empathy cannot be faked. When you have lived it yourself they know it and they accept you and you are comfortable with them because you know each other as peers. The professional staff? They could become actual peers if they are willing to learn a little humility and this sometimes does happen: frequently for rehab therapists and case managers; sometimes for psychologists; for psychiatrists? Almost never. The less power you have the more capable you become of humility. When you have lived with disempowerment, you have lived with real humiliation. You're in. But you will never get the respect you deserve. That is for perceived equals and superiors, and no person who is perceived as ill or damaged is going to get that, and no matter what we do to fight for it, we will be written off as irrelevant, contentious and difficult, and not otherwise listened to. And this is the real kicker. This is almost never consciously intentional. This is where our most primal humanity keeps getting in the way of our developing humanity. Even people who set policy that discriminates against perceived inferiors are often being motivated by forces and fears and lurking collective shadows that they have no clue of. They just go ahead and do what they think is best, and if it saves tax dollars, then so much the better, and whichever government is in power will likely still get voted back into power, not for being compassionate, and only partially for saving our hard-earned money, but for keeping damaged folk like us in their place and not wasting a single nickel more on them. Not all the logic and reasoning in the world is going to persuade them that simply by saving the government millions every year in patient hospitalizations, that peer support workers should be compensated by a wage that is worthy of our hire. Our government, our bosses and the general public are all hobbled by stigma and shame, and if learning how to recognize and battle against this shame and stigma isn't factored into the training and educating of future case managers, social workers, occupational and recreational therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists then we are never going to get anywhere in learning to treat and compensate and respect as full equals the hard-working peer support workers in our mental health system. Saving money isn't the issue. our health care system is already irrationally obsessed with cost cutting to the point of borderline psychosis. This I believe is where peer support workers really need to find their voice and start using it, instead of waiting passively and politely for someone else to fight our battles for us.