Discerning Need – Peer Professionals and the Implementation of the Federal Participation Law for People with Psychiatric Disabilities in Berlin

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jörg Niewöhner
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 464349535

This project explores the relationship between the newly implemented Bundesteilhabegesetz (Federal Participation law) and the needs of psychiatric disability service users and their families. The implementation of the new law in 2018 recognized psychiatric disabilities as deserving of the same organizational, political, and economic rights as other, physiological disabilities. Grouping psychiatric service users under this legal heading has expanded the political definition of agency and has eased the access to support from state programs. At the same time, this shift has failed to take into account the ways in which psychiatric disabilities do, in fact, differ significantly from experiences such as blindness, deafness, or the loss of limbs. To help with the integration of the new law, a comprehensive project was designed to aid in the translation and implementation of the new program at the state level. Conferences, working groups, and a comprehensive website offer important information to local officials and service providers. As part of this larger infrastructure, peer counselors – individuals with lived experience as patients in the mental health system – have come together in association to offer guidance and counseling services to help psychiatric patients navigate the implementation of the new law. This ethnographic research will start with one such peer association, where daily services are provided to psychiatric patients and their family members as they work to understand the consequences and opportunities of the new Bundesteilhabegesetz. However, the peer counselors find that in their professional work families and patients come with questions far beyond the disability law itself, surfacing wide-ranging needs that are not captured in the practical dimensions of the disability law. What the work of the association makes clear is that the unique needs of this particular population have not been fully captured in the new law, or in the understandings of policy makers. At the same time, the central tenet of the revised disability law is divisive for the broader peer community in Berlin. Some groups see the expansion of agency as a necessary and overdue empowerment, others feel that persons with psychiatric disabilities cannot, at their most vulnerable moments, make the same informed decisions that other disability populations can. The project will develop along the network of peer associations in Berlin, gathering information about how they work alongside, in collaboration, or potentially at cross-purposes to each other in order to better understand culturally embedded perspectives on citizenship, agency, and care.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Sebastian von Peter