Join us on Memorial Day for a screening of “the Welcome” followed by a discussion with Brigadier General (ret.) Don Bolduc.  This event is free, but seating is limited.  Please register

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This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required. Please register .

Riverbend CEO Peter Evers is joined by General Don Bolduc to discuss mental health and the military. Bolduc shares his own story of dealing with post-traumatic stress.

26^st September 2017

-Franklin VNA & Hospice

FRANKLIN – Journal therapy is a portable, readily available, inexpensive and highly effective way for a person to reduce their stress level, improve their mental health and develop better coping skills. Kept over time, a journal can help reveal patterns in your life that show mood cycles, stressors and how we react to them, and supportive or unsupportive relationships. It allows you to see how you reacted to a situation and then think about whether you wish you could change something about what you did. Knowing those things can help you recognize what is better to do when life throws you a curveball, or allows you to re-write the situation to practice what you wished you had said so you can do it better the next time around.

With so much to gain from such an accessible activity Franklin VNA & Hospice felt like it was a great opportunity to partner with Hope For NH Recovery, an addiction recovery organization and 51°µÍř Mental Health Services. Two groups serving populations that could get excellent benefits from using therapeutic journaling and it was an activity both organizations felt they could benefit from. Sarah Gagnon from Riverbend said, “We are honored to accept this generous donation from the Franklin VNA & Hospice. Journaling is a fundamental therapeutic tool that we use with our clients to support them with their recovery. We are grateful to have our community partners behind us in this effort.”

Another wonderful benefit of therapeutic journaling is that it can provide emotional relief in the moment. Instead of throwing your cell phone across the room, or saying something you’ll regret later – journal it. Writing frees you to get those angry or sad or frustrating feelings out and onto the page instead of pushing you to actions or behaviors you are trying to avoid. For those struggling with addiction issues this could be the difference between relapsing and staying clean, for those with mental health issues it could be a way to relieve enough stress to avoid falling back into harmful behavior patterns.

Carolee Longley from Hope for New Hampshire Recovery was also excited about the project. She says, “Journaling is very effective. When we help people get into treatment centers we give them a journal as a gift with a message of hope in it to use as a tool during their treatment so they can see how far they’ve grown as they go through it.”

Studies have shown that the very act of journaling is tension relieving.  GoodTherapy.org notes, “Journal therapy is primarily used with people in therapy to increase awareness and insight, promote change and growth, and further develop their sense of self…. The act of writing things down often relieves tension and can bring clarity to the issue at hand.”

Barbara Normandin, Executive Director at the Franklin VNA & Hospice captures the essence of the project when she says, “The Franklin Visiting Nurse Association takes its commitment to serving communities truly to heart. We are proud to partner with these two wonderful groups to help make a real difference in our communities.”

At a time when so many in the world are working to tear each other down, it’s inspiring to see organizations working together to build something good for their communities.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

(Published in Concord Monitor Thursday, July 16, 2015)

Each of New Hampshire’s 10 community mental health centers will have a staff member devoted to helping veterans, military service members and their families connect with other community resources under a first-of-its-kind initiative being launched by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services.

Commissioner Nick Toumpas was joined by state military officials, the directors of VA health centers in New Hampshire and Vermont, and numerous civilian sector partners Wednesday to describe several initiatives aimed at improving health care and other services for veterans, active military and their families. He said the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration recently confirmed that no other state has created military liaison positions within its entire community mental health system.

“We’re improving access to care and creating new access points, and we’re doing this together with all of you,” Toumpas said. “It’s an exciting time for the state, and it’s really an opportunity for all of us.”

In addition to serving as a point person to direct patients to available resources, each liaison will also take the lead in educating others in the health centers about military culture, said Suellen Griffin, chairwoman of the New Hampshire Community Behavioral Health System.

“We don’t want this to be sort of a sleeping dog, where only one person in the agency knows about it, but rather they keep it alive and well and talk about it, and make sure our folks are confident in being able to treat our veterans that may present themselves to us,” she said.

The mental health centers also are part of a second initiative being formally launched Wednesday called “Ask the Question.” The program, being run by Easter Seals NH, is a statewide campaign to encourage health care providers, social service organizations and others to ask patients and clients if they had served in the military.

“We don’t know who we serve. We’ve never been able to get our hands on it, it’s like sand through your fingers,” Griffin said.

The state is contracting with a Portsmouth-based group called Dare Mighty Things for a third new program that will train health care providers and others in military culture to ensure that providers understand veterans and know where to refer them. Navy veteran Nick Tolentino said having health care providers who asked him about his service before a recent surgery made a big difference in helping him avoid a bad experience in the recovery room. Instead of a violent wake-up like he had experienced after a military surgery, he worked with a fellow veteran and staffer at Exeter Hospital to ensure a calm experience, he said.

But Tolentino said he hasn’t always disclosed his military service to health care providers for one main reason: the stigma. He said he feels shame about what he has seen and done, and guilt over surviving when friends were killed.

“You’re always fighting the stigma,” he said. “You were fighting it over there. You’re fighting it when you come home.”

New Hampshire has the fifth-highest ratio of veterans in the United States, with 115,000 veterans making up nearly 11 percent of the state’s population. But the state does not have an active duty military installation where veterans can easily find support and services, and it is one of a few states without a full-service VA hospital. The VA medical center in Manchester, however, collaborates with its counterpart in White River Junction, Vt., and the directors of both on Wednesday praised the new programs as further examples of how government, military and civilian groups have worked well together.

For the Monitor

Friday, April 24, 2015 (Published in print: Friday, April 24, 2015)

There is a wonderful charity called the Wounded Warrior Project that raises money for returning armed services men and women who are paying a price for serving our country. They have a phrase that sums up the sadness of a society that has difficulty in rising up to its responsibility of caring for those who have sacrificed in serving: “The greatest casualty is being forgotten.”

Sometimes those individual casualties of war are not so visible and the mental health consequences of the conflicts that we send our young men and women toward incur a massive burden on our returning heroes.

A couple of weeks ago, Congresswoman Ann McLane Kuster pulled together a roundtable of leaders in community mental health in New Hampshire and luminaries from the VA system who oversee behavioral health issues. She was interested in identifying the gaps in service delivery and assessing the needs of this population of individuals who remain under-served in relation to mental illness and the diseases of addiction. As in the world of health care in general, mental health issues are being identified as a key component of overall health. Unless we pay attention to the mind, the body cannot properly heal.

How much more so is this the case with veterans returning from war zones around the world? How hard is it for them to find help from someone who understands what they are going through? They have been steeped in a culture of independence and individual strength, where reaching out for help is often seen as a sign of weakness.

The VA has been working so hard on the issue of mental health but they can only do so much. New Hampshire has about 110,000 veterans, that is 8.4 percent of the population of the state and the majority of those are Vietnam-era vets.

What became clear during this very timely roundtable was that local community mental health providers need to become more embedded into the fabric of the VA service system so it can complement the services that they provide.

Easter Seals of New Hampshire is providing training at the moment for clinicians in the Granite State to improve their knowledge in the area of treating veterans for depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and this skill set will broaden the base of competent providers who can work with our armed service members.

What struck me as we sat and traded ideas during the roundtable was that we need our representatives locally and in Washington to take up this issue and make it a priority to provide the very best for our veterans and Congresswoman Kuster is right at the forefront of this effort.

As providers of mental health care, we need to grow in confidence and competence so we can meet the mental health needs of our service men and women, and we need to work much more closely with the VA system so we can be seamless when it comes to matching the needs of those who have served and now look to us for help.

(Peter Evers is CEO of 51°µÍř Mental Health in Concord.)