- Peer-Led. The same peers who run the program also lead it, meaning they make up its governing board and all leadership roles, shape its policy, and collectively make final decisions about how to navigate conflict and challenges as they arise.
- Community-Enhancing and Relational. Peer respites are an experiment in building trust and safety outside of the carceral mental health system. They create spaces where lived experience is valued wisdom, where oral histories matter, where people are trusted to know their own needs best, where groups of strangers come together to help one another survive, even when it means taking risks, trusting in situations where you’re not sure of the outcome, and inventing solutions along the way, through collaboration and mutual aid with a Disability Justice lens.
Above All, Peer respites are…
- Voluntary and consensual. No one comes to a peer respite unless they ask to come. No one is forced to receive any “treatment” or “care” or “support” they don’t want, or don’t feel ready for.
- Peer-Run. Everyone working in program operations identifies with a lived experience of destabilizing and/or significant struggles with mental health, emotional wellness, trauma, and/or harm within the medicalized mental health system.
- Trust-Based. Peer respite guests trust peer support workers (PSWs) to honor their autonomy and consent, to prioritize their care and support needs, and to manage their own boundaries. Peer support workers running a peer respite trust the guest(s) to do their best, even while struggling, and to identify and seek to meet their own needs (with support). PSWs trust guests to be as real as possible with themselves and supporters about what they can and can’t do, do and don’t want or need, will or won’t consent to, etc. Everyone involved has to trust in one another’s commitment to honesty, increasing self-awareness, and mutual care for one another’s wellbeing, priorities, feelings, and needs.
- Non-Clinical. This doesn’t mean we don’t see the value in clinical care (some of us are therapists and/or go to therapy); however, that’s not what a peer respite is. Peer respite is about mutual aid and support. There are no “providers” or “clients” or “recipients” or “patients” or “consumers” in a peer respite. If a guest wants to access these supports, our volunteers are welcome to support them in researching and/or initiating contact with providers (or the guest can do this independently, of course).
We do not believe in forced anything – our model is consensual at every step. “Treatment,” mandatory participation, medications, therapy, or “services” aren’t part of a peer respite, but those of us with lived experience of struggling and caring for others know how to do this work, and we’ll offer it with compassion and kindness, while respecting your autonomy — your right to choose or decline support, to accept or reject any offering or resource, to come and go freely, and to make all final decisions about what care looks like for you.
Our framework is based on disability justice, a term that emerged from conversations among queer disabled women of color in 2005, including Patty Berne of Sins Invalid (and Mia Mingus & Stacy Milbern, who eventually united with Leroy Moore, Eli Clare, and Sebastian Margaret) seeking to challenge radical and progressive movements to more fully address ableism. Disability justice is a framework for demanding the liberation of disabled people and communities, founded on the understanding that ableism is intersecting with and co-constructed by white supremacy, carcerality, colonialism, capitalism, and gendered oppression. We thus affirm that our liberation necessarily demands an end to these intersecting systems of power and oppression. Disability justice is founded on an explicit critique of the more mainstream disability rights movement, and is an intersectional and anti-capitalist framework. Disability justice reminds us that “all bodies are sacred and have needs,” and that any experience of being nondisabled is necessarily impermanent.
We also come to this work out of an abolitionist praxis. We understand the system of involuntary hospitalization to be violent and harmful, and rooted in carceral ideology. Peer respite is designed to provide you and your loved ones in crisis with alternatives not based in the carceral system. It is an experiment in community care — in us taking care of each other outside of the clinical context. We don’t involve cops or hospitals or any other systems of violence in your care, unless you specifically ask for that.
Limitations and Boundaries
- We are not able to work with people less than 18 years of age, either as guests of this peer respite or peer support workers.
- We are not able to work with people who are actively detoxing from drugs or alcohol. We are able to work with people who are getting sober or are in recovery without any physical or medical effects.
- If you take medications, please know that we are not able to hold or handle them. We will provide you with a safe to keep them yourself or you can have your friends, family, or paid supports visit to help you.
- We are not able to accommodate stays longer than seven nights.
- We do not offer any clinical supports such as therapy or psychiatric services, though we may be able to help you connect to those services if you desire.
- Our ability to offer transportation is limited. We will do our best to be creative in working with you to get where you need to go, but our ability to offer transportation is limited by budget and time.
Detroit Peer Respite 