"Qualified by Survival"

Qualified by Survival

As I stepped out of church one Sunday morning, a woman rushed toward me with a huge smile. "Caitlynn! It's me… Sarah." For a moment I didn't recognize her. The last time I saw Sarah, she wore a baggy uniform inside Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, shoulders slumped under the weight of depression. Now she stood before me radiant. "You saved my life," she whispered.

I met Sarah while volunteering as a mental health peer supporter, helping people coming out of ‘suicide watch.’ Recent tragedies at Bedford, where two apparent suicides occured within four weeks, make clear how urgent this work truly is (nysenate.gov). I took on the peer support role because I had been there myself, hopeless in a mental health observation room. I remember lying on the concrete floor in booking, crammed into a tiny cell with three other women because observation was full. For four days, I lay curled against the cold toilet trying to escape the lights, the yelling, the eyes. Officers pointed and joked, “Look, it’s the suicide squad! Nobody killed themselves yet?” When I finally spoke with a counselor, the only question was "Do you still want to harm yourself?" Answering honestly meant returning to concrete, humiliation, surveillance. Lying meant receiving a mattress, a real blanket, a pen to document my reality. So I lied. The system had made one thing clear: the people sent to help us weren't equipped to. They asked scripted questions and checked boxes, strangers to the experience sitting across from them. So I stopped reaching for help, and carried it alone.

But in the quiet of that struggle, I found purpose in serving others. Peer support was the first step. Sarah and I spent hours in honest, raw conversation. She was becoming more hopeful, and even began dancing in class, but she still carried a lot. When she made a concerning admission, I had to make the painful decision to send her back to observation. I struggled with that choice, knowing exactly how it felt to be punished for honestly expressing your truth. But it was the right call. Seeing her at church that morning, vibrant and full of life, was proof that skillful, understanding peer support saves lives.

That moment reflects something bigger: inside prison walls, incarcerated individuals are already providing the most meaningful, life-changing support. As peer supporters, educators, and counselors, many of us spend years showing up for people in their darkest moments, developing skills and producing results. Real life social work, yet it counts for nothing on paper. When I came home, I was denied human service jobs because of my conviction, shut out from serving the very people I spent years helping. Meanwhile, I was navigating reentry with counselors who cared, but couldn't understand the strange grief of reentry: the joy tangled with the loss of the community left behind. What was missing wasn’t services, it was support that truly understood. Now, I’m honored to be that support. In my reentry work, I see the value of lived experience every day. One young woman told me recently, "You've helped me more in one hour than a year of therapy has." Because I wasn't just offering advice. I was proof that there is a way through.