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Paper short abstract:

Drawing on an ethnographic research on a peer-led mental health support group in Japan, this paper investigates how peer-staff facing difficulties in sharing feelings of empathy have discovered the paradoxical power of failed empathy and established disconnection as a basis for a new connection.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on three years of ethnographic research on a peer-led mental health support group in Japan named YPS (Yokohama Peer Staff association), this paper investigates why some peer-staff face difficulties in sharing feelings of empathy towards others with mental illness and how they have dealt with it. YPS has become prominent in the peer-support movement in Japan by providing other organizations with its knowledge of how to work with peer-staff. While many workplaces in the mental health sector presume that peer-staff can deeply empathize with other people’s sufferings based on their own lived experience, YPS believes that their true power does not lie in empathy. Many peer-staff members I have interviewed point out the difficulty of genuinely empathizing with users as they often find each person’s experience so different from their own that it precludes easy understanding. To avoid these failures of empathy, some peer-staff have imitated the “professional empathy” they have found in social workers. In so doing, they become what other members call “elite peers,” who acquire moral authority and rise to the top of the peer-hierarchy. However, most peer-staff members have failed and/or refuse to adapt to the social-worker-type of empathy and become what they self-disparagingly call “stray peers.” Over the years, stray peers have cultivated a unique understanding of their inability to empathize and the despair such disconnection can often bring. This paper examines how these stray peers have discovered the paradoxical power of failed empathy and established disconnection as a basis for a new connection.