Rafi Armanto is a peer worker and Orygen's Head of Lived Experience. He writes here about how he learnt about peer work and his passion for the field.
My own journey with mental ill-health began in high school and took away the things that were most meaningful to me. I loved being in the community and finding a sense of purpose there – from helping my local community group selling food at market stalls, to coaching at the local soccer club.
When my own symptoms of mental ill-health came up fiercely and rapidly, all of this was quickly taken away from me. One of the turning points in my mental health journey was realising that being so unwell meant I couldn’t participate in my school’s leadership team anymore, and that profound sense of loss and lack of purpose in my life emerged as a reoccurring theme throughout my recovery. All I wanted was to find my place in the community again and reclaim that sense of purpose in my life which I knew was important to me.
My journey in lived experience started one year into accessing mental health services. I wasn’t finding a sense of purpose in the university course that I was in and wanted to think of other things to do with myself. In an off-handed conversation with my clinician at the time, I mentioned that I felt in a place to find this sense of purpose again through engaging with the community. Unknown to me, each headspace centre has a Youth Advocacy Group (YAG) which she recommended I join. The YAG was a great place to meet likeminded people and gave me opportunities to connect with the community through awareness activities, but also gave me the opportunity to support with internal change as a youth voice within the centre.
In the YAG, I met a friend who was a peer worker at Orygen. This was my first exposure to the concept of peer support or lived experience work, as I did not have the privilege of having a peer worker in my service at the time. I worked in retail and enjoyed this work, but my friend was insistent I would be a good fit as a peer worker, so I started looking into it.
At the time I applied for my first peer work role, the workforce in youth mental health services was still relatively new. Resources around peer support were sparse and I only found two or three articles that described the role in youth mental health.
This realisation pushed me to reflect and consider in myself what peer support means to me, and what it could have meant to a past version of myself. Three things came up from this reflection: the power and importance of experiential knowledge; the unique insights that have come out of my own experiences of mental ill-health; and, ultimately the desire to be someone I wish I'd had in my own mental health journey. I realised that this would be a powerful way for me to reclaim this challenging period of my life and experience to support others as they navigate their own journeys.
As is evident from where I am now, I got the job as a peer worker, with my first role as part of a trial of the incredible MOST program. I worked on the platform to support young people working towards their recovery goals, and held space to explore shared experiences of mental ill-health. Being in my first peer worker role also introduced me to some of the common challenges lived experience workers face, such as being open about experiences of mental ill health, and navigating workplaces where the concept of lived experience roles is new.
These experiences encouraged me to take on my first leadership role within the lived experience workforce, leading the peer work team, and developing the peer work program on MOST. I learned about the concept of lived experience leadership, which was fed largely through my own principles around peer work. It was about ‘being someone I wish I'd had’ -- but this time as a peer worker rather than as a service user in the mental health system. My approach to supervision, leading the team, and decision making, all largely emerged from placing the experiences of young people and lived experiences first, and doing what we do best in these roles: working from the basis of our own experiences.
Being in a leadership role in lived experience also taught me the importance of using lived experience as a lens in my work. What I mean by this is to not use my own personal experiences as the point of reference for the experiences of young people with mental ill-health, but to use the reflections, learnings and insights from these experiences to inform the work I do. When I started project based roles, such as my time developing the International Student Mental Health Peer Work program and my time supporting the development of the Certificate IV in Mental Health Peer Work, this lived expertise was the core of what informed my work and what I taught new peer workers.
It has been one year since I was appointed as Orygen’s inaugural Head of Lived Experience, which has been a culmination of all of these experiences. In a way, my own progression in finding my place as a lived experience leader has been mirrored by the progress made within the mental health sector more broadly – from lived experience representation largely existing in participation programs, to now seeing colleagues in similar role in other health services and organisations. I have the great privilege of being able to walk alongside other lived experience workers at Orygen every day to develop this workforce further, and to work towards better outcomes for young people and families, rooted in the lived experiences of those who use and access our services.
My proudest moment in all of this journey has been seeing the growth of other lived experience workers in the field. From the first team I ever managed, every team member eventually stepped up into leadership roles around the sector. In my own journey to reclaim a sense of purpose for myself, I’ve found myself in a position now being able to provide this sense of purpose for others.