Suporte de pares em Saúde Mental: Grupo de Ouvidores de Vozes

Peer support is considered a recent practice in community mental health and is structured as people with lived experience of mental suffering support people with similar experiences. In this sense, this article aims to analyze the peer support carried out in a hearing voices group held in Ribeirao Preto, in the interior of Sao Paulo. To this, a qualitative study was conducted in which 10 meetings of the peer support group with theoretical support from the International Movement of Voice Hearers were recorded and analyzed. Four peer support actions were identified: 1) build a welcoming space in the group, ensuring that all views are respected and support stories of suffering from other participants; 2) adopt a posture of curiosity in relation to the voices, trying to understand them better, offering new meanings for the experiences, collaborating in the construction of new forms of relationship with the voices; 3) the peers act to establish bonds and expand support networks and 4) instill hope in sharing success stories and in reporting gains and changes they had after they started participating in the group. The possibility of being in a peer support group, can collaborate with the promotion of people's autonomy in addition to providing a space where people can establish relationships of trust. Mental health services need to ensure greater autonomy for peers to collaborate in recovery processes