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For the next few weeks we’re going right back to where Shoulder to Shoulder began over two years ago, revisiting the first six episodes of the podcast and the conversations that helped shape the series.

These early episodes introduced us to people with powerful lived experience, honest reflections on mental health, and a deep belief in the value of peer support.

Listening back now, they still feel just as relevant. These early episodes introduced us to people speaking honestly about lived experience, mental health, recovery, and what peer support actually looks like in real life.

They still matter, because the heart of it was always the same, people who had been through something difficult, sitting alongside others who needed to know they weren’t on their own.

In this first episode of Shoulder to Shoulder by With You, we revisit where the podcast began with Anita’s powerful story of identity, culture, motherhood and peer support.

She shares her journey from childhood in Africa to building a life in Manchester, reflecting on the challenges of adapting to a new country and the importance of connection during difficult times.

At the heart of the conversation is the impact of peer support and how it helped her feel seen and understood, and why support from those with lived experience can be so meaningful. Anita also talks about co-founding Holding Her Space, an organisation supporting mothers and families through pregnancy and early parenting.

As we look back on the first six episodes, this conversation captures what the series set out to do: highlight the people behind peer support and the difference it makes in mental health and everyday life.

Hosted by Cate Munro, Shoulder to Shoulder explores these stories with peer supporters from all walks of life.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

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In this honest and thoughtful episode of Shoulder to Shoulder, Cate speaks with Ciara, a peer support leader, trainer and activist from Ireland, whose own experience of trauma, distress and trying to find the right support has shaped the way she now works with others.

Ciara manages Solace Café in Dublin, an out-of-hours crisis prevention service built around lived experience, connection and compassion. In this conversation, she reflects on growing up in difficult circumstances, struggling with fear, shame and substance use, and spending years in systems that often left her feeling unheard rather than helped.

What changed things was finding spaces where she could speak openly, be heard as a human being, and begin to make sense of what had happened to her. Her story is candid, grounded, deeply human, and speaks powerfully to what peer support can offer when people are properly listened to.

In this episode, we explore:

✔️ How peer support helps people feel understood, not managed

✔️ Why trust, mutuality and human connection matter in recovery

✔️ The difference between lived experience and purely clinical support

✔️ The challenges peer workers can face inside formal mental health systems

✔️ Why honest, compassionate spaces can change the course of someone’s life

Show Notes

Connect with Ciara:
http://linkedin.com/in/ciaraglynn1

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

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In this episode of Shoulder to Shoulder, Cate speaks with Charlie, a peer support worker in an NHS community mental health team, a trainee therapist, and the founder of a growing sober community in Shrewsbury, whose own recovery has shaped the way she now shows up for other people.

Charlie speaks openly about a childhood marked by trauma, anxiety, and feeling responsible for everyone else. She talks about first struggling with her mental health as a child, turning to alcohol in her early teens, and the way drinking gave her a false sense of confidence, control and escape.

She also reflects on being the first person in her family to go to university, getting sober at 22, and the long, "messy" and unglamorous reality of recovery. She speaks about therapy, diagnosis, setbacks, self-discovery, and slowly building a life that actually feels like hers.

Now five years sober, Charlie uses that lived experience in her work every day. In this conversation, we explore:

✔️ How peer support can help people feel seen, understood and less alone

✔️ The link between trauma, addiction, mental health and recovery

✔️ Why lived experience matters in community mental health services

✔️ The difference between clinical support and genuine human connection

✔️ How peer workers can stand alongside people, advocate for them, and help rebalance power

Show Notes

Connect with Charlie:

Insta / Messy Healing

https://www.instagram.com/charlie_martina_fae?igsh=MWRza3NyaWk1aDdw

Shrewsbury Soda Club CIC Insta

https://www.instagram.com/shrewsburysodaclub?igsh=eGx3cnRuZHIxMWt1

My LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlie-martina?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

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In this episode of Shoulder to Shoulder, Cate meets Duncan, who works at Capital in West Sussex, a long-standing, lived-experience-led organisation that has spent nearly 30 years championing peer support, shaping services, and ensuring people’s voices are heard.

Duncan brings his own lived experience to the work, having come through psychotic depression and support that, in his words, felt patronising and disconnected from what he actually needed. That experience helped shape a career spent trying to do things differently.

In this conversation, he reflects on the value of independent peer support, why lived experience-led organisations matter, and what happens when the services people rely on are suddenly pushed to the brink. With Capital facing devastating funding cuts, this episode becomes not just a conversation about peer support, but about what is lost when systems stop listening to the very people they claim to serve.

In this episode, we explore:

✔️ How lived experience shaped Duncan’s path into mental health work

✔️ Why independent peer support offers something different from statutory services

✔️ The role Capital has played in West Sussex for nearly three decades

✔️ What happens when lived experience-led organisations are pushed aside by commissioning decisions

✔️ Why peer support is so often valued by people in crisis, yet still treated as expendable

✔️ The real human cost of funding cuts on staff, services and recovery

Find out more about Capital:

https://www.capitalimpactsolutions.co.uk/
https://www.capitalcharity.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/duncanjmarshall969/

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

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In this episode of Shoulder to Shoulder, Cate speaks with Naomi Salisbury, whose relationship with peer support has spanned decades, both as someone living with mental health challenges and as a leader working to build better support for others.

From advocacy and helpline work to leading a lived experience-led charity, Naomi has spent years at the heart of peer support spaces, especially around self-harm, where understanding, trust and safety matter deeply.

In this conversation, she reflects on what good peer support really looks like, why self-harm is so often misunderstood, and what happens when lived experience is treated as an optional extra rather than something essential.

She also shares her concerns about underfunding, tokenism and the pressure to force peer support into systems that do not always respect what makes it powerful in the first place.

In this episode, we explore:

✔️ Naomi’s journey through peer support as both participant and professional

✔️ Why peer support can be especially powerful for people who self-harm

✔️ How safe, honest peer spaces can hold difficult conversations well

✔️ The risks of reducing peer support to a cheap add-on within formal services

✔️ What proper investment in lived experience-led work should look like

✔️ Naomi’s hopes for the future of peer support in the UK and beyond

Show Notes

https://naomisalisbury.org

https://squarepegsuk.substack.com/about

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

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In this episode of Shoulder to Shoulder, Cate is joined by Emma Bamber, co-lead of Cafe Laziz, a peer-led community space supporting asylum seekers and refugees in St Helens.

Café Laziz welcomes people who are socially isolated, traumatised, and living with long-term uncertainty, many of whom are survivors of war, displacement, and dangerous journeys. What they find there isn’t assessment or diagnosis, but warmth: a shared meal, routine, kindness, and people who understand.

The episode explores why peer-led mental health support works so powerfully in community settings, and how peer support happens naturally when people are given space to connect. Emma talks about food as a universal language, the importance of routine and purpose, and why kindness and consistency can stabilise lives shaped by trauma and uncertainty.

We also confront the wider context: misinformation, hostility, protests, and the dehumanisation of asylum seekers. Emma speaks with clarity and compassion about the harm this causes — and the extraordinary solidarity that can emerge in response.

At its heart, this is an episode about peer support mental health, not as a service, but as a shared human practice.

You’ll hear about:

• Building peer support through community and food
• Supporting asylum seekers living with trauma and isolation
• Why shared experience matters more than professional labels
• Peer support beyond services and systems
• Language, belonging, and mental wellbeing
• Challenging myths about refugees and asylum seekers
• Community as protection against despair
• What hope looks like when people come together

Show Notes:

Cafe Laziz links: https://linktr.ee/cafelaziz

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

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At 19, Michael was living with psychosis - hearing voices, seeing things other people couldn’t, and trying to hold himself together while training as a nurse.

In this episode, he takes us right into the moment it all collided: on a hospital ward, caring for someone who couldn’t move or speak, while the voices in his head were telling him to end his life. It was the night he lost nursing and, for a while, lost himself too.

Michael speaks honestly about what came next: the secrecy, the stigma, the friendships that disappeared, and the deep depression that followed. He also talks about identity, including what it meant to come out as a gay man in Ireland, at a time when shame and silence were already crushing him.

But this is also a recovery story - and peer support sits right at the heart of it.

Michael explains what personal recovery really means when symptoms don’t just disappear. The daily work. The coping tools. The planning. The small choices that keep you one step ahead. And he shares how peer support works in practice - not as “telling your story”, but finding the overlap between two lives and building trust from there.

We also get into lived experience as knowledge - why peer work can’t be supervised using a clinical model, and why the heart of peer support is equality, relationship, and real-world connection.

Most of all, Michael leaves you with one clear message:

Just because you live with psychosis, your life is not over.

Listen if you’re interested in: psychosis, voice-hearing, stigma, identity, personal recovery, WRAP, and what peer support looks like when it’s done properly.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

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In this deeply honest episode of Shoulder to Shoulder, Cate is joined by Louise Nix, who reflects on the first moments of peer connection, how they helped her begin to heal, and how they led her into peer support roles.

Louise shares her story of growing up with domestic abuse, to surviving an abusive relationship, to reaching a point of despair where life felt unbearable. She describes how finding faith was a turning point for her, helping to restore a sense of worth and hope at a time when she felt lost.

Years later, after the traumatic birth of her first child, Louise experienced postnatal psychosis, a frightening loss of reality followed by compulsory hospitalisation. Upon leaving hospital, there was little space to process what had happened.

This is where peer support enters the story. Louise reflects on the first moments of peer connection, felt in the quiet power of another mother offering a cup of tea, listening without judgement, and saying you’re doing okay. That human connection became the foundation for healing.

As a peer support worker, Louise now sits in the space between patients and professionals — breaking down the “them and us” divide, challenging stigma, and showing that recovery is possible, even after profound crisis.

This conversation explores why peer based approaches within mental health services matter so deeply, especially for people who have been traumatised within these services. Louise speaks about peer support as hope in action: “I was where you are, and now I’m here.”

You’ll hear about:

• Surviving postnatal psychosis and inpatient trauma
• The lasting impact of restraint and loss of dignity
• Why silence and stigma delay recovery
• Finding healing through informal and formal peer support
• Becoming a peer support worker after lived experience
• Peer support as hope, not fixing
• Challenging the “them and us” culture in mental health
• A message of reassurance for anyone who feels afraid or ashamed

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Show notes & resources:

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

With-you consultancy: www.with-you.co.uk