Peer Chat launches with Rai Waddingham!
The Peer Chat podcast brings you insights and inspiration from people using their lived experience to support others and develop peer approaches.
In conversation with Scottish Recovery Network’s Lesley Smith, our first ever guest on the series is Rai Waddingham and the theme is peer support groups.
Rai is an independent trainer – Behind the Label, a writer and an Open Dialogue Practitioner. She hears voices, sees visions and has a whole range of experiences many label as ‘unusual’. At times these have overwhelmed her, leading to a range of diagnoses she no longer identifies with. Rai managed the London Hearing Voices Project for many years. She has worked with people who hear voices or have unusual beliefs across youth, adult and prison settings. Rai is now Chair of the English Hearing Voices Network. She is studying for a PhD in Survivor Knowledge.
In this episode Rai shares her experiences of participating in and facilitating peer support groups.
Listen or watch for ideas, top tips and more.
It’s something around building up knowledge, it’s’ a bit subversive really. We’re in this field where professional and academic knowledge takes up a lot of space. And they’ve got their value, but many of us have had our experiences overwritten, obscured, reframed, interpreted in ways that don’t feel comfortable. And peer support groups allow us to kind of find our own stories and connect with that and build up our own knowledge, separate in many ways to the professional knowledge. And a place of empowerment, I guess. It’s where I learned that I had something to offer.
Rai Waddingham.
