What is the problem/issue being addressed?
A large number of people with severe mental illness (SMI) receive no treatment. This treatment gap is largest in low and middle income countries (LMIC), with detrimental effects on individuals (social role, quality of life, stigma) and societies (equity, costs). Peer support is an established intervention involving a person in recovery from mental illness being employed to offer support to others with mental illness. Peers are an untapped resource in global mental health.There is a need to explore the effectiveness and feasibility of peer-delivered interventions for people with severe mental illness in LMICs. Peer support offers great promise to health sytems with few resources where standard care is often of lower quality and coverage. There is also a lack of peer support for people with SMI in specific components of mental health systems in high income countries (HIC), e.g. acute care.
Why is it important for society?
UPSIDES will transform mental health care, by using the expertise of people with personal experience of mental illness as a new source of recovery support. Peers carry the potential for a distinct contribution not possible from traditional mental health professions such as psychiatry, psychology and nursing. As they de-stigmatise mental illness, offer alternative viewpoints in understanding clients, and strengthening a person-focused (rather than a pathological-focused) discourse, their function is vital for users’ recovery processes as well as the enhancement of system change towards a recovery orientation.
Scale-up of peer support through UPSIDES will lead to a larger group of citizens with mental illness benefiting from the intervention, and will alleviate the global burden of mental disorders by improved functioning of health care systems, promoting recovery-orientation, reducing stigma, and increasing health equity. UPSIDES will make available a sustainable intervention by producing guidance for other low-, middle- and high-income countries to initiate PSW programmes. This includes European additional benefit because the major UPSIDES deliverables, i.e. an evidence-based cross-cultural implementation strategy for peer support in mental health care settings, will be transferrable with some adaptation to other countries (mostly, but not exclusively LMIC). This process will be facilitated by UPSIDES team members beyond the duration of the project which will also strengthen European capacity to compete in the field of Global Mental Health.
What are the overall objectives?
The major aim of UPSIDES (Using Peer Support In Developing Empowering Mental Health Services) is to replicate and scale-up peer support interventions for people with severe mental illness, generating evidence of sustainable best practice in high-, middle- and low-resource settings. Scale-up will be achieved via sequential objectives:
(1) To establish an international community of practice for peer support in high-, middle- and low-resource settings.
(2) To conduct a situational analysis of existing peer support initiatives in the participating countries.
(3) To scale up peer support models with a focus on vulnerable populations where pilot initiatives already exist.
(4) To contextualize and adapt peer support models for those sites where there are no peer support initiatives.
(5) To rigorously evaluate inputs, processes and outcomes of implementation, including an assessment of process and contextual factors following a theory of change approach using mixed-methods.
(6) To distil from case studies evidence of best practice for dissemination to local, national and in-ternational stakeholders in order to maximise sustainability and spread.
