Browsing by Author "Čaic, Martina"

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Mutual empowerment: Leveraging co-design to facilitate collaborative partnerships in mental healthcare
(2021) Park, Jooeun
School of Arts, Design and Architecture | Master's thesis
Currently, mental healthcare services around the globe are faced with many challenges, among them the mutual disempowerment of mental health peer supporters (hereafter peer supporters) and mental health professionals (hereafter professionals) working together in pairs. Peer supporters are persons having a mental health condition who offer emotional support to others sharing a similar mental health condition. Professionals are persons specialising in the diagnosis and treatment of mental health issues. A myriad of studies identifies that professionals resist peer supporters, associating experience of mental health crises with vulnerability and having fear of devaluing professional knowledge. This causes mutual disempowerment of peer supporters and professionals. However, it is yet to explore the way peer supporters handle psychological damage at work. Moreover, researchers are not aware of studies that look into the way to overcome the professionalism of professionals so that they recognise peer supporters not as clients but as partners. Lastly, no previous studies have sought methods to facilitate equalised communication between peer supporters and professionals. Therefore, the motivation for this research is to validate the unique strength of peer supporters and increase their participation in mental health service delivery. This thesis was developed on three conceptual frameworks: Recovery-oriented practice, Values-based practice, empowerment in co-design for power-sharing Taking the historical moment of an opening of peer supporter employment as an opportunity to contextualise the research setting, the empirical research was conducted with 10 mental health service organisations in a change in Seoul and Busan, South Korea during spring-summer 2021. Six peer supporters and five professionals working at these organisations were invited to seven semi-structured interviews and two co-creation workshops, in order to discuss their needs at the time they start to work together and the way they can support each other. Interviews and workshops were recorded, transcribed and analysed employing affinity diagrams. The findings revealed that both peer supporters and professionals can build skillsets to keep their mental balance through steady self-reflection training and service ownership. Indeed, the research proved that not only peer supporters but also professionals experience stress when they are exposed to traumatic experiences of people with mental health conditions. Aligned with education, the clear role distribution of peer supporters and professionals emerged to be significant for professionals to understand that the unique strength of peer supporters complements professional knowledge rather than challenges it. Exploring it in detail, the qualitative analysis characterised that experience of peer supporters in mental health issues and knowledge of professionals in rehabilitation create a synergy effect when they work together. In order to initiate this synergy, the co-design mindset of sharing power needs to be grounded, combined with participatory methods in use for equalised communication assistance including a working life manual, a life-long education and language sensitivity training suggested by peer supporters. In conclusion, the research demonstrates the possibility of co-design to work effectively to support mutual empowerment by helping peer supporters and professionals reflect on their collaboration experience and express their ideas to reshape this experience under non-hierarchical rules. Not only that, it brings new knowledge that both peer supporters and professionals give and receive support, as well as the need for service organisations to prepare a collaboration guideline in their daily work.