The mental health peer worker as informant: performing authenticity and the paradoxes of passing

an article by Jijian Voronka (University of Windsor, ON, Canada) published in Disability & Society Volume 34 Issue 4 (2019)

Abstract

The inclusion imperative in community care means that disabled people are now increasingly being employed as peer workers in the service systems that manage them.

This article offers a timely inquiry into the role of the peer worker in mental health and homeless service sectors.

Drawing on a four-year ethnography and in-depth qualitative interviews with fellow peer workers, I explore the paradoxical nature of new expectations for peer ‘authenticity,’ and the ways in which peer workers learn to manage the requirement to perform identity in our work roles.

This analysis thus denaturalizes peer identity, and works to develop possibilities for doing disability identity-based work differently.

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