“Evidence- and Practice-Informed Characteristics of Peer Support Practices”—an article being written for publication in Death Studies, the professional journal of the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC)—concludes that:
Peer support helps the suicide bereaved, [and] there are identifiable elements of peer support practices and programs that are informed by research …
The authors—Franklin Cook, Linda Langford, and Kim Ruocco—are still at work on the final draft of the article, but Suicide Grief Resources is sharing two excerpts that should be immediately useful to people engaged in Peer Grief Support after Suicide (PGSS), which is the term the article uses to describe the field of practice involving support between people bereaved by suicide. Specifically, the article defines PGSS as:
… social, emotional, instrumental, and other assistance … based on relational mutuality and interpersonal connectedness … [that is] formal, intentional support delivered by survivors of suicide loss to other survivors.
The excerpts available now for use by PGSS helpers are:
- “Evidence- and Practice-Informed Characteristics of Peer Support Practices” [LINK], which identifies 30 features of practitioners’ approach to helping for which there are indicators of effectiveness
- “Evidence- and Practice-Informed Characteristics of Peer Support Programming” [LINK], which identifies features of organization- and program-level implementation of peer-to-peer services that have been shown to be beneficial to people receiving assistance
This is the first in a series of Suicide Grief Resources posts in the Foundational Documents category, which will briefly describe and provide links to items essential to the understanding and development of PGSS as a field of practice in its own right.
The article is now in the hands of the editors at Death Studies, but I do not know whether it will be a few months or a lot longer than that before it will be published.