Our aim is to bring together people from a variety of backgrounds (geography, philosophy, training, educational backgrounds, and perspectives) to share the richness of their lived experiences as peer providers, veterans and clinicians in order to learn with and from each other. It will hopefully enable us to come to come to a common understanding of how to support people using some of the best practices available.
What we are doing is building a Veterans peer community - providing resources, training, mutual support and oversight. Making it safer for our veterans and for those who support them.
No Duff’s anecdotal experience over the past three years of delivering quality support services to our veterans’ community has seen waiting times for professional counselling & psychological services of up to six months. Rather than bemoan the lack of resources, No Duff decided that rather than wait for a solution from others, we would grow our own.
The Peer mentor course, the first of our provider training courses, is a formally delivered package specifically designed to train individuals to support veterans in crisis. It is a mentoring course based upon best practice from other groups already providing this kind of support.
The Peer Support Course has three stages of training; Peer Mentor, Peer Navigator and Peer Counsellor. The current course is the Peer Mentor stage only. Delivery of the course and ongoing supervision of Peer Supporters will be managed by a team headed by the Trust's clinical medical Advisor and other mental health providers.
Combined with our extensive experience in delivering immediate support to veterans, a new client management software and our existing team of committed volunteers, the Peer Supporter Course will produce a long overdue mental health support capability unparalleled in the history of the NZ veterans support sector.
No Duff remains committed to improving the state of the NZ veterans support sector and has committed to lead the way in doing so.
The Peer Support Model
Peers are the key to recovery — I can’t emphasise that enough. Credentialed mental health professionals like me have no place in center stage. It’s the veterans themselves, healing each other, that belong at center stage. . . . We are stage hands - get the lights on, sweep out the gum wrappers, count the chairs, make sure it’s a safe and warm enough place.
Quoted from an extended interview with Jonathan Shay, WGBH’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, May 28, 2010; transcribed and quoted in Guntzel, “Beyond PTSD.”
Jonathon Shay is the author of Achilles in Vietnam and is the psychiatrist credited most with changing the modern understanding of mental injury in military veterans.
We are in the process of building a stepped care model for veterans support, from self care through peer mentors and counsellors to specialist clinical providers. By providing both a learning hub and the Peer courses our aim is twofold - to increase the support to the veteran and providers and also to build our understanding of supporting veterans.
Sebastian Junger is an American journalist and author who embedded with US troops in Afghanistan. In this excerpt from his TED talk he describes eloquently what so many military veterans understand intuitively.
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Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.