The foundation for "peer support," in which people who have experienced mental illness help others with lived experience recover by staying alongside them, is expanding noticeably starting this year. The Ministry of Health and Welfare will designate 20 education and training institutions to train peer supporters within this year, and will increase the peer support respite centers, of which seven are currently funded, to 17 nationwide by 2030. The plan is to center the expansion of respite centers on regions outside the capital area. The training is run in a form that reduces lectures and greatly increases the share of discussion and practice.
An activity support program that covers labor costs for institutions hiring peer supporters begins at the same time. Peer support infrastructure, mental health welfare centers and mental health promotion facilities are eligible, and the plan is to start at a scale of 88 people this year and increase in stages to 300 people by 2030. In that funding to underpin employment is attached, it is a change in which activity that had been close to volunteer work takes on the form of a job.
Jung Kyung-sil, head of the Ministry of Health and Welfare's Office of Health Care Policy, visited the Korea Center for Independent Living of Persons with Psychosocial Disabilities in Gwanak-gu, Seoul, on the 20th to look over its operations and sit down with staff and users. This is a peer support center located in Seoul where people with lived experience plan and operate programs themselves. At the meeting, recovery programs including Open Dialogue, self-help groups and the status of training to develop peer supporters were introduced, and policy tasks for expanding the foundation were taken up together.
This visit has the character of listening in the field in order to reflect the experiences of those with lived experience in the Third Basic Plan for Mental Health and Welfare now being drafted. The basic plan is a national plan that the Act on the Improvement of Mental Health and the Support for Welfare Services for Mental Patients requires be established every five years. The Third Plan applies from this year through 2030, and its release is scheduled for the end of this month.
Views on the drafting process do not converge into one. What differs about the Third Plan, compared with the Second Plan issued in 2021, is that several organizations of people with psychosocial disabilities took part. At a public hearing held on the 6th of this month at the Eroom Center in Yeouido, Seoul, Ministry officials, the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs, and activists from psychosocial disability organizations came together, and measures such as expanding acute-phase beds and hospitals were presented. Even so, some in the lived-experience camp point out that the discussion flowed toward experts and that their demands did not soak sufficiently into the plan.
Lee Han-gyeol, secretary general of the Korea Center for Independent Living of Persons with Psychosocial Disabilities, put his name to that discussion as a joint research committee member. He is a person with schizoaffective disorder and an activist who has kept watch over the field of independent living and rights advocacy for people with psychosocial disabilities for more than a decade, and he was selected as a recipient of the 2025 Korea Disability Human Rights Award. He also serves as CEO of the Gyeonggi Woorido Social Cooperative. The very fact that a person with lived experience is sitting in the meeting room where the plan is being made is a scene that did not exist before.
The backdrop against which the government's mental health policy sits also needs to be seen together. Since taking office, President Lee Jae-myung has set a goal of cutting the suicide rate by 40% by 2034. When measures toward that goal lean toward increasing beds and facilities, the way in which people meet people in the community and carry recovery forward is liable to be pushed back relatively. Peer support is the axis that holds up the other side.
Since the three strands of respite centers, training institutions and labor cost support are moving at the same time, the regions where one can meet a peer supporter several years from now will be wider than they are now. Once the final text of the Third Basic Plan comes into view within this month, it will be possible to see how far the words exchanged by those with lived experience in the meeting room have remained as sentences. The programs at the Gwanak-gu center are running today by the hands of people with lived experience, regardless of that.
