Kendall is a new youth peer counselor who has a vested interest in reaching out to young people with mental health issues. Her attitude about this: "I would have loved to be in a program like this. I think it would have changed my college years a lot if I had". Kendall is proud to be part of a team that takes services into the community where young people with mental health issues are most likely challenged to use new skills and strategies to promote positive mental health. She is also sensitive to how she herself responded to counseling and tries to tie that into her new work.
One photo and the story behind it: Kendall chose to take just one picture to begin her reflection. Its a photo of her new work badge. "I chose that picture because I received services here for five years before I was actually hired. It really represented the fact that I had gone from being in services to providing services and all within the same community, the same building.
Youth peer support responsibilities: So my role is on the WISe team. It's Wraparound with Intensive Services. Specifically they are supporting youth 5-20 years old. Although they are not specifically addressing employment, they are working to support good mental health. It's a great program, and my role there is as a peer support, specifically youth peer.I think peer support is impacting young people because it's giving them a voice. One of our jobs is advocacy and teaching them to advocate for themselves, communicating their wants, needs, feelings. Because sometimes they're not communicating them at all or they're communicating them in an unhealthy way. And so it's giving them the chance to say what they need to say and get people to listen.
Philosophy of services: "We try not to meet with them as much in the building, but out in the community where they're having their difficulties, you know, in their home, their school. It's important for one reason because when you're in the building it's a controlled environment. You don't have the stressors. You don't have the uncomfortable-ness of being in the community. And the other thing is just about meeting people where they are, it's a convenience factor. So we try to meet them at their work on their lunch break, at home while they're cooking dinner. And we sit in the kitchen with them and talk with them.So we try to just make sure that we are available to our families where they need us.
Perceptions of the job: "It's a little intimidating. I have days where I'm very unsure and I have to sit back and when I get home and go, "Okay, there is no magic thing I'm going to say that's going to fix their problems. For me, it took a lot of personal hard work. So I have to realize that that's what they need to do. They can see that these things do work. When I'm talking about coping skills I'm not talking about something that seems unachievable. I'm talking about something that I have used in my every day. I make the skills that they're trying to teach relate-able and livable. And I make it so that they can look at that and go, "Oh, there is a way I can apply this to my life. This is how she does it." And we can sit there and talk about how they can do it".
Advice to her young clients: It's never going to go away. And I can tell them that. And I can assure them that it's possible to work through it, to live with it.
Connections to her own experiences with counseling: "I have been in services, so I know what it's like for a child to sit on the other side of the table and how difficult it is to talk about things with a therapist and how hard it can be going to school. So I bring that experience to them and they can look at me and say, 'Wow, she got over these things that I'm dealing with,' and I can help provide them with hope, which is the whole goal of a peer is to provide hope
Support and training for job: "They're pretty open to me coming in and asking them questions like--I've gone in and I've talked to my therapist and just been like, "I'm having some difficulty with feeling like I don't know how to set those boundaries. How do you do it?" And so we sit there for 20 minutes and talk about how to stop those thoughts before they start.These people know that I come with [a history] and they respect me for that because I'm willing to open that up for all of the individuals I work with to judge and hopefully learn from.