DANIELLE DONALDSON: Welcome to Peer Into Recovery, a podcast with a focus on the profession of peer support. For more information about how to subscribe, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I am your host, Danielle Donaldson. In this episode, I’m going to be talking with David Rockwell about providing crisis peer support. David Rockwell is a Certified Peer Recovery Specialist and Trainer based in Richmond, Virginia, and identifies as someone with a lived mental health experience. He spent 12 years working with Henrico Area Mental Health and Developmental Services in Glenelg, Virginia, and worked with the Emergency Service Team and at the Henrico County Crisis Receiving Center for eight of those years. Hey, David. Thank you for joining me today.

DAVID ROCKWELL: Thank you, Danielle. It’s good to be with you.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: How are you doing?

DAVID ROCKWELL: I’m doing pretty good.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Are you faring well with the stay-at-home orders and the COVID-19 crisis?

DAVID ROCKWELL: I’m not going out hardly at all just to pick up groceries for a time. That’s about it.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Yeah, us here as well. So, I know and other people who know you know that you’ve been doing professional peer support for quite some time. But I imagine some of those people probably don’t know your story and maybe would like to hear a little bit about how you got started as a peer recovery specialist.

DAVID ROCKWELL: Sure. Happy to do that. I started having mental health lived experiences when I was in my early 20s. So, it’s really been with me my whole life. And I managed it with medication and with counseling for years. I managed to just stay on even keel and that was all I needed. About 17 years ago, I reached a pretty bad place in my life. And I actually attempted suicide, which was not successful, obviously, but I almost didn’t make it. So every day goes by and I thank God for a second chance because I’ve enjoyed the life I’ve had on the other side of that. So I was stuck in grief for a long time because I lost jobs and friends and a whole bunch of things because of this attempt. And I was, I had to go on disability. And I thought I would never get to work with people again because I had over 35 years of experience in human services. So I was like, I’m never going to be able to work again like that.

And so about the time I switched over to being on disability, I moved from private psychiatric care to community health, psychiatric care. I became a client at the Henrico Mental Health Community Services Board. And that was the first time I ever heard about recovery. I had never heard that in all the decades before. And no one had ever sat down and said, you know, you can recover from this and it’s an ongoing process and you’re not alone. So, when that happened, I, it’s like a light bulb went off in my head and I started, you know, really embracing that whole concept. Because I had tried all the meds and tried all kinds of other treatments. And I learned from my case manager about a training program that was being held in Charlottesville, Virginia training people to be peer specialists. And that just seemed like a good fit for me since I like working with people and because this was personal to me. So I went up to Charlottesville for a semester, went through college level classes, and came back for a summer’s internship with Henrico, and took to it like a fish in water. I mean, it just felt right to me. So I started and then they offered me a job after my internship was over. They offered me a job.

So I started out as a case management peer specialist, becoming the first case management peer specialist for Henrico. I did that for about four years. Then I started wondering out loud with certain people that worked for Henrico, why don’t we have peer specialists with crisis team? At that time, there were no peer specialists working with ESB crisis teams across the state. So I began a conversation with Richard Edelman, who was the crisis program manager. We started talking and talked for months and months basically. Together, we crafted a position. It was part-time at first. I had to go through the usual application process and everything. Other people applied for it as well. But I was hired as a part-time crisis peer specialist. And I did that for about two additional years. And then I was offered a full-time job, which I became full-time crisis peer specialist. And this coincided with the opening of Henrico’s Crisis Receiving Center. A bunch of funding had come down the pike to open these assessment sites and there were three original ones that were opened across the state, ours being one of them. And ours was the only one that had a peer specialist. So I became the first full-time peer specialist working with a crisis team and the first full-time peer specialist working with a crisis assessment site.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: That’s amazing.

DAVID ROCKWELL: Yeah. So that’s how I get into doing the work that I do.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: What did a typical workday look like for you when you were doing this type of work?

DAVID ROCKWELL: Never a dull moment. There are basically three speeds with crisis work. It’s slow, steady, and then really, really fast. So, it definitely is a job that raises your adrenaline because we were and I’m assuming they still are the busiest assessment site in the state of Virginia. At times, we would have maybe one or two peers there that were under police custody, under an ECO. Other times, we’d have as many as nine all at the same time there. This was hospital-based. It was a partnership between Parham Doctors Hospital and the CSB, create this assessment site. So, a typical day for me would start when I got to work and I would check in with my coworkers and check in with the off-duty CIT police officer and with nurses as well to see what was going on because sometimes it’d be already peers there. Then I would spend my day, meeting with peers in their hospital rooms, listening, doing a lot of listening. It was really a very humbling experience because here were people that were having one of the worst days of their lives and once I’d earned some of their trust, they started to pour out their trauma to me. I listened and I helped to link them to resources in the community that weren’t necessarily CSB resources and just kept them company.

There were times when all I did was sit in silence with a person. They brought one person in one time. Obviously, I’m not going to give the name or anything or identifying. This was a young man who came in and who was not interacting with anyone. The paramedics tried to get his help on moving him from the ambulance gurney to the bed and he wouldn’t respond. Nurses came in and took blood and did things and he just had no interaction. So the clinician went in, the CSB employee went in to evaluate him and didn’t get very far. She concluded that he was catatonic. So she came back to the office and then I decided I would go in the room. I always introduced myself and asked permission to come in. I don’t ever just force this on anybody because peer support is voluntary. I went into the room and I introduced myself. He wouldn’t meet my eye, which is staring at the ceiling. I said, I’m just going to sit here in silence with you for a little while. So I sat down for about 20 minutes and didn’t stare at him or anything, put any pressure on him. At the end of 20 minutes, I stood up and said to him, I’m going to go back to my office now, but I’ll come back and check on you in a little bit. Immediately, he spoke up. He said, could I have a cup of water, please? I said, sure. I went and got him a cup of water. When I came back, he said, you know what? I don’t think I’ve eaten for the last couple of days. Is there any food available? I arranged for that. Little by little, he started talking and interacting. He wasn’t catatonic. He was terrified. He was just totally aware of his surroundings. I proceeded to talk to him about recovery and talked to him about, we actually talked about WRAP that day because he was looking for concrete tools to manage and help him with his mental health challenges. So we talked about the key principles of WRAP.

So there were days like that that were very powerful. There were days when I would just simply go into a room and somebody would say, get the, you know what, out of here. And I would do it because they had lost all control. Basically, they felt out of control because they were in custody and they were having such a bad day. And not only is Peer Specialist Services, not only are they voluntary, but they’re also, this was also a case where I wanted to give the person a little bit of their power back. So if they didn’t want to talk to me, that was okay. They didn’t have to. And I made sure they knew that. And other times, you know, we would have so many peers in there that I would go from room to room, basically, and spend 10 or 15 minutes with each person to kind of build some rapport. And then I’d go back and check on them all.

There were peers that were there that I spent a long time with. I spent, my record was eight hours. Eight hours I spent with one peer was the only peer that was there. He was a juvenile, a teenager. And he was, it was hard. He was having a hard time holding it together. And every time I would, if I left the room to go use the bathroom, whenever he would start getting agitated and everything. So I would just stay in there with him and actually hold his hand, and keep him company and keep him focused on other things. And we talked about things other than mental health too, just keep his mind centered. But then there were other peers that I spent a couple hours a year in there. And so a typical day would last me, I would work eight hour days. Sometimes they turn into 11 or 12 hour days. If we got really, really busy and it was late at night, I would stay some extra hours and then you shave some hours off the end of my week. But typically I worked an eight hour day. So that’s a little bit about what a typical day looks like.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: If there was a peer specialist out there that, you know, this type of work is calling to them, are there any particular challenges they need to be aware of or prepared for is what kind of experiences could you share that maybe would help them start off on the right foot? Does that make sense?

DAVID ROCKWELL: It does, yes. So, being a crisis peer specialist is different than being like a case management peer specialist or peer specialist working in a drop-in center or something like that. It’s not harder necessarily or better, it’s just different. The first thing that you become aware of is that there’s a lot of trauma that’s being unloaded. I would spend all day long listening to people’s trauma and basically have to guard myself against secondary trauma. But the first thing I would tell somebody who is interested in this kind of work is that have good self-care skills, be able to manage all of the things you’ll be hearing. That includes trigger because as peers, we all have experiences we’ve had that if someone else has the same experience or shares it with us, it might trigger us a little bit. Just be aware of that, be aware of your body and aware of your spirit and your minds. And, and your emotions. So also, I would say to anyone who is interested in doing this, that it’s very rewarding. I mean, like that story I just told you, there are days that you work with somebody and is such a powerful connection. And you really feel like you’ve made a difference in somebody’s life. And I had a lot of those experiences. But you also had people, as I said, who would not want to let you in the room. And you had to learn how to brush that off and not take it personally. Because again, these are peers who are having a really rough day. And perhaps they weren’t ready to talk. There were peers sometimes that would tell me to get out. And then I’d go check on them later. And they were open to that point to talk to me. So and like I said, I also sat in silence with people. There are times I would just sit in the room and keep them company. I actually had some peers ask me, can you just stay with me? Because they didn’t want to be alone in the surroundings. They were in a very sterile hospital surrounding with police officer outside the door.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Right. Yeah. So do you have any particular recommendations like for trainings or skills that people could develop in order to do this particular kind of work well?

DAVID ROCKWELL: We definitely need to go through the core Peer Specialist, Peer Recovery Specialist training that’s offered in Virginia, offered by the certified trainers through DBHDS. You need to start with that. This is not, this kind of work, working with crisis is not something that you start out with for the most part. It’s something that’s a little more advanced. So, it’s good to have good listening skills. It’s always good to have that as a Peer Specialist, but especially with people in crisis, because I always remembered from my Peer Specialist training, it’s always about their story, not mine. And I would share pieces of my story as appropriate to make that connection and to let them know they’re not alone. But I would let them do most of the talking. And you have to be willing to do that. I’m actually working on some training right now, because as far as I know, there’s no crisis year specialist specific training in the state of Virginia. So, I’m working on a training while I’m in under house arrest, or whatever you want to call it.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Yeah, yeah.

DAVID ROCKWELL: Trying to develop a way to, and just going over my own experiences and things I’ve been through, and then good information about how to go about doing this work, and taking from other resources like SAMHSA, and other states have crisis peer specialist as well. And so, yeah, it’s like I said, it’s really advanced peer support in a lot of ways. So I wouldn’t recommend somebody starting out as a crisis peer specialist. I would say work a little bit in another role for a little while, get some traction under your feet, get some experience before you start having to deal with the high adrenaline, high stress, trauma-informed kind of care that goes on at an assessment site.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Yeah, I agree that, I mean, first of all, it seems to me that crisis peer support is a calling for some very special individuals. I mean, I totally admire everything you’ve done, but I know personally it’s not a job that I don’t think I could do it. But it is so very valuable, and I think it’s really exciting news that you’re developing a training. So I think there’ll probably be a lot of interest in that once you’ve got that ready for people. So you did briefly mention being trauma informed, and I imagine that in this particular work, having appropriate boundaries is probably really important.

DAVID ROCKWELL: Yes.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Was there any particular trauma training that you thought was particularly helpful?

DAVID ROCKWELL: I have had so many trauma-informed trainings both via webinars and in person. I also have a background in counseling. So I have master’s work in counseling. So that has informed me. I’m not a counselor anymore, so I don’t try to be a counselor, I’m a peer specialist. But all of my training that I went through to become a counselor was definitely has played into how I approach people and how I listen to them and how I support them. I can’t think of a specific trauma-informed training, but it’s definitely a key factor in doing crisis peer work because you’re dealing with trauma every day. I mean, these are people that not only are they having a really bad day and are in trauma at the moment. They most of them, as we know, most peers have some trauma in their background, and that tends to bubble up when you’re having a bad day. It’s very important to be trauma-informed and aware and to keep yourself current on that. Obviously, as a certified and registered peer specialist, I have to keep up with my CEUs each year and try to get the training I need, the ethics training and then other kinds of trainings. I try to look for trainings that are going to inform me when it comes to doing the kind of work that I do.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: You’re involved with CIT as well, am I right?

DAVID ROCKWELL: Yes.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Crisis intervention teams?

DAVID ROCKWELL: Yes.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Is there any type of overlap or connection between them?

DAVID ROCKWELL: Yes. The crisis assessment site is under the umbrella of the CIT program. All of the assessment sites across the state are under the umbrella of CIT. CIT, as you know, is a law enforcement driven program. They provide the 40 hours core training for, used to be just law enforcement and now it’s first responders. Henrico was the first organization in the country and perhaps the world to include firefighters and paramedics and judges and nurses and doctors and all kinds of other people. Everybody would be on the same page. I’m also a CIT instructor. I’m certified in that. So I participated regularly with Henrico’s Peer Specialist trainings. I mean, sorry, CIT trainings. So you work very closely with law enforcement and with other first responders in this job, and you have to learn to balance that out and have a good relationship with them. That’s another key thing is balance. You have to find the balance because sometimes I find myself needing to be neutral. You know, I didn’t want to be associated with the police if that was a negative connotation for the people that were in custody.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Right.

DAVID ROCKWELL: Nor did I want to be associated necessarily with the clinician or the medical staff. I was kind of a neutral person that the people, the peers feel like they could talk to. So, yeah, it’s definitely interwoven with CIT.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Do you have any final thoughts or suggestions or recommendations for anyone who’s listening?

DAVID ROCKWELL: I would say that if you feel like calling to go into this work, as I said before, try something, try a different peer position for a while. Go ahead through the training, get your 500 hours, all those kinds of things, and then try to work as a peer specialist for CSB or a drop-in center or something like that. Give yourself a couple of years to do that. Then if you still feel that calling, definitely go for it. I mean, as I said, it’s very rewarding work. It really wears you out, however, and it’s worn me out on more than one occasion. Because in the assessment site, the clinicians go in and do the report or do their assessment, then they come out and write the report for seven hours or whatever it takes. The officers outside, the nurses are coming and going. But oftentimes, I was the only person that had time to stay with them. So I was listening constantly and listening constantly to the trauma that they had experienced. So yeah, I would say it’s a worthwhile position within the peer specialist world. Something definitely to pursue if you’re interested in that kind of work. I’d be willing if anyone wanted to email me and ask me any specific questions, I’d be willing to respond.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Great. Why don’t you share that email with everyone, and I’ll also include it in the show notes on the web page.

DAVID ROCKWELL: Okay. So it’s pretty simple. It’s all lowercase and it’s Virginia spelled out for F-O-R and then recovery. So Virginia for recovery, all one word, at gmail.com.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Great. Thank you. Thank you, David, for joining me today. I really appreciate you sharing your expertise in this particular line of work. Like I said, I know it’s such a valuable service for people who are, when people are at their lowest and they need peer support more than they probably even know.

DAVID ROCKWELL: Yes. Well, thank you for inviting me to do this. It’s been a pleasure talking with you.

DANIELLE DONALDSON: Well, I appreciate it because I know you’ve got lots of expertise to share with others. I hope people will reach out to David and ask him questions about this particular line of work, if it’s something that you’re passionate about. With that, I just wanted to thank everyone for listening to the Peer Into Recovery podcast. It was brought to you by the Virginia Peer Recovery Specialist Network and Mental Health America of Virginia. If you like our show and would like to subscribe, please visit our website at www.vprsn.org and please leave us a review on iTunes. Take good care of yourselves and thanks for listening.