Historically, the mental health system and the conversation surrounding it has given more value to the expert opinions of providers and clinicians than to the experiences of those living with mental health conditions. But for a while now, that has been changing. For well over a decade, the Hogg Foundation has been elevating the visibility of mental health consumers and has thrown its full weight behind the peer support and recovery movement.
Right here at the University of Texas at Austin (UT), there has also been a full flowering of a peer support community specifically for students. Called Longhorn SHARE, it was launched in 2022 with the support of the UT’s Longhorn Wellness Center. Its first and only coordinator, Adrian Lancaster, is our guest for this episode of Into the Fold.
SHAREd Struggles
“Students would come to my office, cry, talk about things they were struggling with. And there were so many repeated refrains of ‘I’m the only one’. And I knew that wasn’t true because I talked to thousands of individual students,” says Adrian. “I often found myself thinking: if I could just get them in the same room together, they would experience so much more validation and realize that a lot of these struggles, while not the same, weren’t singular, they weren’t unusual.”
To foster these connections among students, Adrian helped launch the Longhorn SHARE Project in 2022. It offers a variety of peer-led opportunities for students to connect around similar experiences, share wisdom and resources, build interpersonal confidence, and find their place while supporting others in return.
To develop the program, Adrian first formed an advisory group made up of ten student leaders with experience in peer-related activities on campus. Together they identified gaps on campus in peer-related programming and developed the skills needed to do peer support work effectively. The advisory group also coined the name ‘Project SHARE’, an acronym which stands for: Support, Healing, Active listening, Reciprocity, and Empowerment.
“The ‘E’ almost stood for ‘Empathy’, but we decided to go with ‘Empowerment’ instead,” says Adrian. “The students and I both really wanted for the program to not feel like a place where people go and talk about their feelings, and everybody looks at them with sad eyes. No, we’re trying to empower them to know how to seek help, what their boundaries and needs are, how to define their feelings, how to support other people competently, and how to feel good about creating community through mutual support. So, much more of an empowerment than an empathy vibe.”
Support Settings
UT undergraduate and graduate student SHARE Support Specialists are essential to the program. While they aren’t licensed or credentialed professionals, Support Specialists do receive a full semester of training, including Mental Health First Aid certification, that prepares them to provide peer support.
“Support Specialists learn skills that they can hang their lived experiences on,” says Adrian. “They learn communication and group facilitation types of skills, and para-counselling skills like active listening and motivational interviewing techniques. These are all skills and strategies that we can use to relate to each other, and they aren’t that hard to learn.”
Much of Support Specialists’ work takes place in SHARE Communities and SHARE Circles. SHARE Communities are weekly student-led groups where peers with similar interests, concerns, or wellness goals can find community and social connection, while SHARE Circles are story-telling circles based on indigenous/First Nations practices. Circles help build community, empathy, and understanding among groups, and the turn-taking structure ensures that everyone’s voice is heard.
“We’re really hoping to create spaces where you can be yourself and be kind of a mess and know that you can still support other people and show up and see each other fully,” says Adrian. “We’re also really focused on making these spaces non-hierarchical peer support environments where everybody feels like they have something meaningful to contribute.”
Support Specialists also work across campus with student organizations, in classrooms, and other campus communities that request their services. They have also participated in collaborative events with UT’s Blanton Museum of Art and the Outdoor Recreation Department’s Adventures Trips.
Building Trust
Trust is essential to effective peer support.
“A big part of trust building is just assuming that there are things the people in the room know that you don’t know, but you need to know,” says Adrian. “It’s seeing people with you as equally capable, equally wise, and as people that you can learn from.”
Showing up and participating with authenticity helps nurture this sense of trust.
“Authenticity is a big piece that I think students struggle with at the college age, speaking mostly of traditionally aged college students,” says Adrian. “But, of course, I think it’s something lots of people struggle with. There’s just a vulnerability in that.”
Adrian has also learned the importance of following a student’s lead.
“The first thing I teach students is how to ask for consent before just jumping into advice,” says Adrian. “When somebody comes to you with a concern, it’s practicing saying, ‘Are you looking for advice? Or do you just want to vent? Or how can I support you with this?’, instead of assuming. This approach makes such a big difference.
“You do not have to be struggling so hard that you can’t function to show up to a SHARE Community,” says Adrian. “I think everybody who’s been through something ever has a lot to offer other people. And the power of sharing your wisdom with someone and seeing its impact creates really meaningful relationships. It makes you realize your worth. I mean, everybody has it, but it’s hard to see until you see how your existence makes a difference to somebody else – just by virtue of being yourself.”