Abstract
The reflection focus of this article is the formation of a social network through an internet social media, the Intervoice, seeking to understand how social networks integrate in offerings of peer support. By choosing the experiences lived by voice hearers on Intervoice's virtual environments as the main axis of our approach, we seek to identify the existence of a change of perspective in relation to the exclusively descriptive approaches by voice hearers, as well as analyzing if this social media, whilst broadening the possibility of interaction and sharing of experiences, favors the process of peer support for people that hear voices. A methodology was developed from the observation of the Intervoice posts on Facebook from September 2014 to May 2015. After thorough analysis, we concluded that Facebook was the media with most interactions when compared with other media such as Twitter and YouTube. Thus, we selected the most interesting posts and comments and pointed out issues and specific discussions, particularly those that dealt with peer support. The results of this research point to the extreme relevance that the peer support through virtual environments and social networks has been gaining in recent times, mainly by the possibility of real time interaction.
Keywords:
voice hearers; peer support; social media and networks