| Acceptance, community, social experiences, and genuine friendships |
“I think one of the other aspects of this program is the connection between people who have lived experience, providing some support and some, maybe I could call it, normalcy to people who are newer to brain injury. (…) We know how vast and how varied brain injury is, and I think having somebody to help to normalize that experience can be really, really powerful.”
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Peer support staff—2 |
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“It allows people to meet new people even if you are just talking on the phone. It’s sort of increasing your circle if that makes sense. Your friends, of course, are always going to be there for you, but a lot of people don’t understand brain injury and they don’t get what makes people tick or not tick.”
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Partner—17 |
| Vicarious experience/learning through others: shared experiences, role-modelling, encouragement |
“I find the conversations I have with my new partners are a lot more focused on brain injury and their symptoms. They often ask me about my experiences and I’m comfortable sharing that as well, so they’ll ask about what my symptoms are like, how was returning to work, various concussions that I’ve had, and what that looks like and what I’ve found helpful for my recovery and that kind of thing. |
Caregiver mentor—22 |
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You share, for people you support, I guess you share some of the activities, and some of the ups and downs that you have gone through, and some of the solutions … and I’ve also been able to get some tips from people that I was supporting, just by chatting and seeing what they have done. I said, oh, that might be a good idea to try.”
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| “She is really inspiring me or helping me to do the things that I did before but yet I stopped because I thought, because of the brain injury, that I wasn’t able to understand… Or even, I can learn old things that I did know before yet I had lost all the confidence that I had before… Knitting, for example. I was an excellent knitter, but now, like, I had to understand and to relearn the stitches and that. So I ended up sewing or knitting dishcloths for a long time. It’s boring, it’s always the same thing, but she’s also a knitter and she really encourages me to go ahead, and to try again.”
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Partner—21 |
| “I feel better” |
“I think it definitely helps improve my mood, because I feel like there were times before I was connected with anyone that I was feeling pretty low and kind of despondent.”
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Mentor and previous partner—7 |
| “One of the most apparent might be mood, because you have that subjective self-report of I feel better. And what does better mean? Do we want to slap a depression scale on them? I don’t know. And I’m sure that may be involved in the study is a pre and post various mood-related questionnaires. But the challenge with that is, can you directly correlate the mood to that peer support intervention or the intangible? Tangible but yet intangible is the passage of time. And what are all these life events coming together to create that sense of acceptance? That will be very tricky to try and quantify in an RCT.”
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Peer support staff—1 |
