Introduction

In the past 20 years, a new kind of health support worker has emerged in Western mental health care, the so-called ‘peer support worker’ (Hurley et al 2016; Mowbray et al 1996; Repper and Carter 2011). Peer support workers are former mental health care clients, who use their client experience to support other users of mental health care during their recovery process. Peer support workers’ unique asset is their ‘experiential knowledge’, which they add to the delivery of mental health services. Although this sounds reasonable and relevant, and although the rise of peer support workers is clearly visible throughout mental health care, from the neo-Weberian perspective adopted in this chapter this rise is not without questions and is not uncontested. In fact, peer support workers seem to be struggling. This is related to the complexities of forming a new occupation (Abbott 1988; McMurray 2010; Tholen 2017), especially when workers must position themselves vis-à-vis existing professionals like psychiatrists, psychologists and nurses. In addition, it is related to the complexities of using and incorporating experiential knowledge, especially when expert knowledge and evidence are privileged.

In this chapter we will focus on the rise and role of peer support workers in mental health care in The Netherlands. We describe how the emergence of peer support workers is taking place, what kind of development they go through, and how relationships between this new type of worker and regular mental health professionals takes shape. We analyse this development from the perspective of generic professionalisation theory, but we use findings from a specific recent study on peer support workers, and we analyse the way in which expertise, evidence and experiences are interwoven – or not. In this way we can examine the potential incorporation of peer support workers in mental health care teams, in terms of both control and content, as professionalisation is a matter of establishing ‘controlled content’ (Noordegraaf 2007). We examine how they position themselves and are taken seriously (control), as well as how their expertise, that is experiences, are linked to the services rendered (content).