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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A quick reference guide to mental health on university campus: a brief rhetorical analysis of fear

an article by Joel Hawkes (University of Victoria, BC, Canada) published in Disability & Society Volume 34 Issue 1 (January 2019)

Abstract

I was teaching rhetoric at the University of Victoria when I received the ‘Quick Reference Guide: Assisting Students in Distress’, part of the university’s initiative to address the increasing problem of mental illness on university campuses.

I immediately read a rhetoric that presented mental health as Madness, as something to be feared, a threat to the university, class and the individual.

This short article is a brief rhetorical analysis of this Guide, and suggests that we must move beyond fear if we are to begin to address the mental health crisis on university campuses.

Full text (PDF 8pp)

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