What I learnt after a year of volunteering with Mind

Almost exactly one year ago, I started volunteering with my local branch of Mind, which is a popular mental health charity based in the UK. The year before, I’d started the first stage of my counsellor training, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to practise the skills and give back to the community in some way. So, after a summer of intensive training with Mind and a long matching process, they paired me with a service user and off I went.

The idea of peer support is that you’re paired up with someone who has a similar background or mental health experience. You then meet with this service user, peer or ‘client’ as often as you mutually agree to do so. You offer them support, the specifics of which are… well, murky. I’ll get into that later.  

Having now completed a year of volunteering, I’m reflecting on what I’ve learnt from doing this. Maybe it’ll be helpful to you if you’re looking to volunteer in the mental health space, or maybe you just want to hear me spill the tea. Either way, here we go:

1.         Sometimes, people just want to VENT.

I was doing my coaching diploma while volunteering, so I very much had the mindset of: ‘We need a goal, we’re going to work towards that goal, and I’m going to use techniques to get you there’. Very quickly, I realised that didn’t work with my client. For a long time, I felt like our conversations were meandering, like treading water, so that I came out of each session feeling drained, even though I hadn’t done much other than listen.

After a while of this, I checked in with her. How did she feel this was working? Because I certainly didn’t feel like we were making progress.

And then I realised – I felt a need for progress, to achieve goals, not the client. The client said that, actually, just offloading every week was very cathartic for her. Sure, we could look at goals like ‘building confidence’, but in reality, me just sitting there, listening and silently validating her was more helpful than that. Just because I thought I knew what she needed didn’t make it so.

That leads me to my critique of the peer support initiative. As a peer support volunteer, I’m not sure what our role actually is. Is it just to listen? Is it to give advice? Is it to coach? From my perspective, the role needs to be much more defined, with training specific to that definition. I personally interpret it like peer-to-peer coaching, as it’s meant to have a goal focus – and yet the training didn’t contain any talking techniques we could use to optimise outcomes. I think there’s a missed trick there.        

2.         You don’t click with certain clients straight away, and that’s okay. 

They say rapport is perceived ‘sameness’ between you and the client. The client and I had some sameness – I could relate to her struggles with anxiety – but we were also from different backgrounds, and that was evident from the start. I felt a sense of guardedness from my client that I thought might be to do with that.

However, the more I gradually spoke about my own struggles, the more rapport we built and the more effective our sessions became. I was lucky this happened, because some volunteers don’t click with their peers at all and it quickly fizzles out. We don’t always have this rush of connection with clients, and it’s wildly unrealistic to think that we will. It’s okay not to click – that’s life!

3.         Boundaries are IMPORTANT.

Setting and enforcing boundaries really is a skill, isn’t it? Mind were very good about setting out boundaries with the client from the start, but inevitably, boundaries are pushed. Most of the time, this isn’t malicious or conscious. I found my client consistently cancelling on me, often an hour before we were due to meet. This became very frustrating as I was taking time off work to volunteer. I ended up introducing a cancellation policy and an end date to our sessions. It felt awkward and harsh to do this (though in hindsight, I should have had this from the outset) but lo and behold – after I implemented these boundaries the late cancellations stopped, and the quality of our relationship and sessions improved, as we knew we had a dedicated amount of time together.

As uncomfortable as it is to set boundaries, it often leads to greater connection. It’s a skill that gets easier and easier with practise. Volunteering has underscored to me (yet again) how important boundaries are for helping work.

There you have it! While I definitely recommend volunteering somewhere like Mind, be prepared for the mental and emotional energy and commitment it requires. If you have experience doing peer support, I’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on this, too.