A ladder of its own
Beyond the Clinical Ceiling: Elevating Lived Experience as a Distinct Professional Discipline
As mental health services evolve toward recovery-focused models, peer support specialists (PSS) are increasingly recognised as essential. But with that recognition comes a persistent problem: the system still assumes that peer work is a steppingstone rather than a sustainable career. This glass ceiling isn’t just unfair — it threatens the integrity of the entire recovery movement.
“We need a workforce where ‘peer’ is a career, not a phase.”
The Missing Pathway
Peer support changed my life. While clinical care helped in some ways, it wasn’t until I connected with people who had lived through similar experiences that real recovery felt possible. Peers gave me hope — not through diagnosis or treatment plans, but by showing me what survival could look like.
That hope led me to become a peer support worker myself. I’ve been privileged to grow into leadership roles over time, but most peers I started with didn’t see that as an option. With limited progression available, many of them retrained as clinicians — not because they stopped believing in peer work, but because they couldn’t make a living staying in it.
“Too many of our best peers leave — not because they want to, but because they have to.”
The “Clinical Dilution” Trap
When peer workers are pushed into clinical roles for advancement, something critical is lost. The transition replaces:
- Mutuality with hierarchy
- Connection with assessment
- Storytelling with diagnosis.
Even clinicians with lived experience find themselves working under a model that discourages the kind of vulnerability and self-disclosure that made them effective as peers.
“We lose more than staff when peers leave — we lose culture, credibility, and connection.”
Why Peer Support Is Its Own Discipline
Peer support isn’t junior to clinical work. It’s something entirely different — a discipline rooted in mutuality, trust, and shared lived experience. It’s grounded not in managing risk, but in holding space. Not in expertise over others, but in walking alongside.
“Peer work isn’t a rung on the clinical ladder — it’s a ladder of its own.”
What Makes Peer Work Distinct
- Builds trust through mutuality and self-disclosure
- Offers hope grounded in lived experience
- Navigates systems from the inside out
- Disrupts discrimination and models recovery
- Centres the individual, not the diagnosis
“You can’t teach what it feels like to survive — but you can build systems that value it.”
Peer Work as Culture Keeper
When peer support is reduced to a clinical-lite role, we risk losing the cultural heart of the recovery movement. The lived experience workforce holds the values of recovery — inclusion, authenticity, community — in a system often dominated by bureaucracy and risk aversion.
If peer leaders aren’t retained and resourced, those values can quietly erode. Without senior peer roles, recovery becomes an add-on, not a driver. And we lose one of the few roles in the system that consistently centres the voice of the person receiving support.
“Without a pathway for peer leadership, recovery culture is swallowed by clinical systems.”
Where to From Here?
If we want a recovery-focused system, we need a recovery-sustaining workforce. That means building real pathways for peer leadership, investing in long-term roles, and treating lived experience as expertise — not just empathy.
“Let’s stop asking peers to prove their worth by leaving peer work behind.”
This is a call to funders, policy makers, service leaders, and peer advocates:
- Build roles that peers can grow in — not out of
- Resource senior peer positions rooted in lived experience
- Embed peer leadership into service design, governance, and sector strategy
- Ensure pay parity and progression for peer roles — without clinical conversion
