When it comes to mental health, a peer can be a life saver

Michael Hardie hadn’t taken a first sip of his coffee at South Lake Union’s Uptown Espresso when a young man carrying a Bluetooth speaker hurried into the cafe and stood at a nearby pillar. He was agitated, muttering to himself.

“You doing OK?” Hardie asked him. “You doing all right?”

The man glanced at him, and, still muttering, turned away, ignoring Hardie’s question. A moment later, the antsy guy ran — pranced, really — out the door of the coffee house, where a woman was stopping people on the sidewalk, asking for money.

We were smack in the center of the purpose and commerce of the neighborhood and mental illness was all around us. In a way, it was a fitting situation during this, Recovery Month.

“Life is challenging and some of us struggle with things,” Hardie said, matter-of-factly, then took a sip of his coffee.

Hardie, 56, a burly man with long, graying hair, knows this better than most. He used to be one of them. After depression and anxiety led to years of drug use, he found himself at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Seattle, locked in a room and sitting in a chair bolted to a floor.

It was his lowest point. He had to get better.

Those who had improved told him they did it with the help of peer counselors — people who had been where they had, come out of it, and were later trained to help others pull through.

Years later, Hardie is a peer counselor and trainer with Optum Pierce RSN, in Pierce County. Optum has trained 474 certified counselors who work in evaluation and treatment centers, community mental health agencies, hospital emergency departments and the county jail in Pierce and other counties, including King and Snohomish. They not only counsel, but connect people to treatment services, support networks and other community mental health resources.

The Washington Division of Behavioral Health and Recovery trains peer counselors all over the state, but also allows regional support networks like Optum to fund and present the training.

“Peer support is the way that the human race solves problems,” Hardie said. “It’s walking with someone who has been on a similar path. Whether it’s plumbing, trying to find a pair of shoes, diabetes or mental health, you’re telling your difficulty to someone else, and asking, ‘What did you do?’”

Not only does it help, it makes fiscal sense.

In 2014, state lawmakers added $37 million to the state budget, and another $32 million in the new budget to add beds for psychiatric boarding.

Also last year, the state Supreme Court ruled it illegal to hold people involuntarily at facilities — like emergency rooms — that did not have staff trained to handle such cases. In some cases, they simply strapped patients down. Gov. Jay Inslee ordered health officials to come up with alternatives to boarding.

Peer counselors offer a human connection and are able to direct people to the right treatment, often helping to avoid hospital stays and, in some cases, imprisonment. They are also there to help with transitional housing, applying for benefits and family services.

Since Optum was brought in to Pierce County, there has been a 31.9 percent reduction in hospitalizations, a 32 percent reduction in involuntary admissions and a 32 percent reduction in the 30-day readmission rate.

To become a peer counselor, someone must prove he or she has “consumed” mental-health services. The work focuses not just on hope, but responsibility, education, self-advocacy and support. Clients are taught what to do when they are triggered; to withdraw to a safe space or deep breathing.

Those who receive peer counseling are more likely to succeed in their recovery and management, whether it be from mental illness or drug and alcohol addiction — which often run hand-in-hand.

“There is certainly a need for people with a degree,” Hardie said. “But there is also a place for someone who has been there. You see a light come on when they recognize that I am one of those people.”

Hardie, who lives in Puyallup, grew up in the Skagit Valley, where early on he was deemed “incorrigible.”

He couldn’t find his place. He struggled with alcohol and drugs. He spent four years in the Army as a mechanic before going on to Western Washington University, where he got a degree in psychology.

But in graduate school, he was hit with depression, started skipping class and eventually left school, later finding work fixing lawn mowers at Sears.

For 13 years, he assembled bicycles for chain stores.

“I was the ‘get it together’ guy,” Hardie said. “I could get anything together but my own head.”

He was injured on the job in 2005 and fell into a cycle of substance abuse: drinking, smoking hash. “It was the way I knew to be able to stand my life,” he said.

He went cold turkey, then felt so awful he considered suicide. That’s when he found himself in the mental ward of the VA.

“I wasn’t even safe to be alone,” he said. “Then I saw other people in the hospital who were sick and started to get well. There was a kernel of hope for me.”

That hope came in the form of his peer counselor, who not only helped him heal, but showed him what he wanted to do with his life. He became a certified peer counselor, and now trains them for Optum. He’s married and happy, and unafraid to reach out to those who suffer — wherever he finds them, and even before he’s had coffee.

“Sometimes we have to hold the hope for someone who is incapable of holding it for themselves,” Hardie said. “If you can’t hold hope for yourself, maybe I can hold it for you.”