THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 6, 1996 TAG: 9609060005
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A16 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: 50 lines
Pain - physical, emotional, economic, social - abounds.
No one is immune.
But pain leads most of us to reach out for help or to give it. Reaching out to others in empathy, sympathy, understanding is essential to survival of the species. Without reaching out and connecting, we do not long survive; we wither.
The aim of the second-annual Citizens Helping Citizens Conference scheduled for Saturday, Sept. 21, at the Scope cultural and convention center is to provide volunteers with information, insights and contacts that will enable them to identify and get help for substance abusers, the mentally ill and the mentally retarded, including children.
The Norfolk Community Services Board hopes that at least a couple of hundred volunteers who work with youth, the elderly, the homeless will show up for the daylong conference, which will offer a dozen workshops led by experts. If more volunteers showed up than a couple of hundred, that would be even better.
For more than 25 years, the Norfolk Community Services Board has been providing prevention, treatment and rehabilitation services - currently, more than 50 kinds of services - for the mentally ill, the mentally retarded and substance abusers and their families.
Community services boards are locally controlled. Norfolk's board aids thousands of men, women and children annually. Last year, the Norfolk board provided services for 3,200 of the mentally ill, more than 600 of the mentally retarded and 2,900 substance abusers. Among these were people who needed and got shelter.
This year's conferees at Scope will learn, among other things, that mental illness - for example, clinical depression - usually stems from chemical imbalances in the body that can be treated chemically; that the mentally ill as a group are no more violent than the population at large; that mental retardation is not inevitably accompanied by physical deformity and that the mentally retarded usually are happiest when they are included in the ``normal'' world, not shut away with others who are retarded.
Volunteers attending the Sept. 21 conference will be taught how mental-health or substance-abuse-rehabilitation aid is obtained for people exhibiting aberrant behavior. Volunteers at churches or in scout troops or recreation centers who encounter attention deficit disorder or mental retardation will learn how to point the way to available services.
Training volunteers and upgrading their knowledge and skills are ever important. But training and education are especially pertinent now that funds for social services are dwindling. Pain, alas, is not dwindling. by CNB