Ideas for a stronger field
Clear thinking on peer support, behavioral health policy, and the systems that help relationship-based care grow.
Policy · practice · research · field notes
From the Pulse
Analysis for people building, leading, and funding peer support.
Experienced peers have the trust and readiness to run their own organizations. What they lack is infrastructure. Smores Health Practice closes that gap.
The peer support workforce has grown to over 100,000, but many specialists work in professional isolation. Why workforce connection is the missing infrastructure.
Roughly 600,000 college students are in recovery, but most campus programs run on one staffer and a thin budget. The infrastructure has not caught up.
Therapy went from psychiatry-only to a $28B industry. The structural pattern that made it scale is now showing up in peer services.
When behavioral health budgets get cut, peer services are often the first casualty — even when they're the most cost-effective intervention on the table.
Peer support didn't start as a workforce — it started as a movement. Tracing the history from self-help groups through activism to certified peer specialists.
How to make the financial case for peer support without reducing peers to a cost-saving lever. Talking ROI while keeping the work human.
How Section 1115 Medicaid waivers are expanding peer support coverage across states — and what the expansion means for people in recovery and the peers who serve them.
Learn what peer support specialists do, how lived experience shapes their role, where certification fits, and how teams support effective peer programs.
How health records evolved from paper charts to modern EHRs — and why they still can't capture the work peer support specialists actually do.
Clinician burnout isn't a personal failing — it's a systems problem. Why mental healthcare is running out of workers, and what peer support can absorb.
Loneliness, transition, and identity loss in your 20s. Why this decade hits mental health so hard — and how connection through shared experience helps.
Mental health funding is politically contingent and chronically unstable. What that means for people in recovery when budgets get cut mid-cycle.
Why New Year resolutions drive shame and disengagement for people in recovery — and why sustained peer connection beats willpower as a protective factor.
Research shelf
Accessible research on connection, recovery, and the science of peer support.
The neuroscience of why peer support works when clinical care can't reach people in the moment. How shared-experience connection regulates the nervous system.
What neuroscience teaches us about cravings and how to ride them out. Why urges peak and fall in predictable waves — and how peer support changes the curve.
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