4 - (SYM 80) From Adversity to Advocacy: Empowering Family Members Through Ongoing Involvement as Peers Teaching Skills to People with Borderline Personality Disorder's Supporters

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a high-prevalence and chronic mental health condition with significant emotional pain coupled with  impairment in social and close relationships.

Family members supporting someone with BPD often suffer alongside their loved ones without much access to support and education.

After losing her daughter who suffered from BPD to suicide, Lynn Courey, created The Sashbear Foundation (Sashbear) in 2011 to help families with a loved one with BPD or related problems with skills and hope. Transforming her adversity to advocacy, she brought the evidence-based Family Connections (FC) program to community-based settings in 2014. Now, Sashbear disseminates FC broadly across Canada. FC consists of delivering education, skills and support to family members of individuals with BPD. As originally designed, the program is solely delivered by trained peer volunteer facilitators. However, while FC has been shown to be helpful to program recipients and is widely disseminated, the lived experiences of the family members who facilitate it remain understudied. Moreover, it remains unclear whether program recipients believe the peer-led element of FC to be important.

Thirty two leaders of FC programing with the Sashbear Foundation were therefore recently administered a semi-structured survey focused on their experiences of receiving and administering FC on themselves and their relationships with people with BPD and related problems. Quantitative and qualitative results suggest that leading FC helps family members learn new skills themselves, is of great personal value, and enhances family relationships. It further suggests that FC consumers and leaders believe that it is important that the program is led by peers with lived experience. This presentation will provide an overview of these results, supplemented by the speaker’s own lived experience as a peer FC facilitator. Ultimately, this presentation will illuminate the importance of peer facilitated programming for family members of people with BPD, and explicate the lived experience of these family members.