News & Events

An article discussing a support group programme initiated in response to the Manchester Arena attack in 2017 as an example of a psychosocial approach to post-disaster support. Its purpose is to highlight how a bespoke psychosocial peer-based initiative can complement and enhance mental health responses following collective trauma events. It gives an overview of psychosocial…

There is growing recognition that females engage in harmful sexual behaviour that is similar in severity and type to males. Existing research, however, suggests that there is a bias towards leniency in judicial systems for female sexual offenders (FSOs) in comparison to male sexual offenders (MSOs). Specifically, FSOs receive shorter sentences than do MSOs and…

Male-on-male rape is a critically under-researched area in the sexual violence literature. This is in part due to narratives that portray sexual violence as a female-only issue, which has led to substantial gaps in the current knowledge on male-on-male survivors’ experiences. However, evidence suggests that male sexual violence is prevalent and carries significant psychological consequences…

Sexual abuse of boy children is a significant but under-acknowledged and under-addressed problem globally. The worldwide prevalence of sexual abuse of boys is estimated to be 3–17 per cent (Barth et al., 2013). In India, Ministry of Women and Child Development (2007) conducted a large-scale national study of children aged five to eighteen years and found that 52.94…

Establishing structured peer support in mental health, particularly for people with schizophrenia, as a psychosocial intervention is early in low and middle-income countries like India. Before implementing and understanding the effectiveness of peer support service and which mode of peer support delivery will be suitable for our culture, our study aimed to understand if peer…

Homeless people are increasingly supported by peer workers in one-on-one mentorship relations, called intentional unidirectional peer support (IUPS). Intentional unidirectional peer support refers to “a formalized mentorship type of peer intervention where the peer is clearly more advanced and is mentoring the client in an organized fashion” (Barker et al., 2020). Research investigating the effectiveness…

Peer Support is an emerging discipline within mental health services (Slade et al., 2014), providing opportunities for positive role modelling and peer influence (Faulkner & Basset, 2012). The embodiment of recovery by peer workers disrupts for service users the “chronicity of their patient role” (p. 884) reinforced by models of care focusing on symptom reduction and illness…