Family & Peers
peerteam@whistlerfirefighters.com
An essential contributor to recovery, peer support is a supportive relationship between people who have a lived experience in common. The peer support worker provides emotional and social support to others who share a common experience. Peer supporters are not counsellors but can provide you with an ear to listen, ask what has worked for you before and help resource you for additional support or care.
You are not alone. Please reach out.
“The Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) defines peer support as “a supportive relationship between people who have a lived experience in common concerning either their own mental health challenge or illness or that of a loved one.” The ultimate goal of peer support is to help workers experiencing mental health challenges achieve hope and recovery.
For someone experiencing a challenge, the insight gained from a peer support worker’s experiential knowledge can be deeply supportive. First responders attend calls and witness events that can cause them to experience intense emotional, physical, cognitive, or behavioural responses. These can be traumatizing and interfere with performance during and after incidents. They also face daily stressors every day in many people’s work and home lives. The compounding effect of life stress and trauma exposure can harm their mental health.
Often, co-workers who have had similar experiences can provide support and referral assistance through peer support, improving the lives of their peers and helping them towards recovery, empowerment, and hope. Peer support may also reduce the use of formal mental health, medical, and social services, which can reduce the cost of a first responder’s recovery."
Quoted from “Supporting Mental Health in First Responders, Overview of Peer Support Programs, BCFirstResponderMentalHealth.com”
Peer Support helps to reduce the stigma of accessing mental health, medical and social services treatment.
Find a co-worker you connect with to share issues that bother you and support them in return. Resilient Minds has supported hundreds of firefighters in developing strategies to mitigate and better manage occupational stress, resulting in informed and healthier teams.
Firefighters learn to;
a) Recognize the effects of psychological stress/trauma on themselves and their peers
b) Communicate with peers who may be struggling
c) Respond promptly, safely and appropriately to distressed citizens
d) Apply personal strategies for managing stress, mitigating trauma, and boosting resilience.
Innovative and Evidence-Informed Resilient Minds is a skills and resilience development training course designed by and for firefighters using the latest literature on resilience, stress, and stress-related injuries.
Firefighters Train Firefighters – Using a peer-to-peer model of instruction, the Resilient Minds curriculum is taught by firefighters to firefighters.
Paid-on-call and Career Firefighters– Resilient Minds is the only training program designed to train both career and volunteer firefighters and considers the differences in experience and resources available to these two groups.
THE 4R ACTION TOOLKIT
For more information, please visit http://www.resilientminds.cmha.ca/
Refer to Module 2, and support peers using the “4Rs Action Toolkit” in the Resilient Minds Building the Psychological Strength of Firefighters Participant Workbook as a reference when speaking with peers you think may have a mental health injury.
Having a conversation can be challenging. Here are some gentle reminders of how to support your coworker. If you'd like to learn more or resource them to the peer team, we're here to help you directly with the resources or the individual.
