Examining the psychosocial impact of providing peer support for mental health concerns among youth: A scoping review

Youth peer support models for mental health may be one cost-effective and acceptable pathway for ameliorating the youth mental health crisis. However, there is no consensus on whether providing peer support has positive or negative impacts on the mental health of the youth peer supporters themselves. This scoping review aimed to survey available literature on this topic and determine directions for future work. Articles were included if they examined youth or young adults (individuals < 26 years old) acting as peer supporters for mental health concerns, collected outcomes that either directly measure mental health concerns, general distress, or wellbeing among peer supporters, or asked peer supporters to describe the impact of being a peer supporter on their mental health or wellbeing, and were available in English. A total of 1,638 papers were identified through database searching, of which three papers were ultimately selected for inclusion. All three papers were fully qualitative in nature. An inductive thematic analysis revealed two key factors (social connection/validation and responsibility/purpose) that positively impacted peer supporters’ mental health, one key factor (self-evaluation) that had both positive and negative impacts, and one key factor (exposure to stressful stimuli) that negatively impacted peer supporters’ mental health.