USA - Imagine seeing a job description that lists your mental health struggles as a qualification

USA - Imagine seeing a job description that lists your mental health struggles as a qualification. For Beth Walters, that moment changed everything. For the first time, her lived experience wasn't something to hide — it was something of value. That realisation set her on a path to become one of the leading voices in peer support in the US. Last week, she took the stage as keynote speaker at the 2026 Duvall Conference at University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee — and the room of 200+ scholars, practitioners, elected officials and community members leaned in. Her definition of peer support is worth sitting with: "People with shared lived experiences connecting with each other." Not fixing. Not diagnosing. Not deciding for someone else what their recovery should look like. Just meeting people where they are — because you've been there too. That philosophy was echoed by Sonya Johnson, a Lead Peer with NAMI's Parents 4 Parents program, whose words may have been the most powerful of the day: "I believe in people because I was once the person who didn't think I could do it." That's what peer support is. That's what no clinical training can fully replicate. Conference chair Dane Minnick put it plainly: "You can't replicate the insight that comes from lived experience." The conference didn't shy away from the hard stuff either. Panelists acknowledged real barriers: low pay, role drift, insufficient funding, lack of formal recognition. A toolkit is being developed to help organisations work through these challenges — because good intentions aren't enough without infrastructure. The theme of the day — "Peers at the Center: Building a Modern Behavioral Health Workforce" — isn't just aspirational. It's a workforce strategy. A public health strategy. And for many people in that room, a deeply personal one. When systems are built around lived experience rather than in spite of it, people heal faster, stay longer and bring others with them.