Southold Town is set to address the dearth of services on the North Fork for teens and adults facing crisis situations.
At Tuesday’s work session, the town board met with Robyn Berger-Gatson and Dr. Larry Weiss of the Family Service League and Southold’s Special Projects Coordinator Phillip Beltz to discuss proposed FSL trainings sponsored by the youth bureau.
The program is aimed at helping teens and adults facing crisis situations, including suicides, fires and shootings, among other traumatic events.
Councilman Bob Ghosio said he’d experienced firsthand how well the program works after John Romanelli, his dear friend and former colleague at Burt’s Reliable, died after a tragic accident. “After John was killed, we had 35 people in shock. They came out and counseled everyone and it was a big help,” he said.
According to Beltz, treatment for youth with mental issues is difficult on both the North and South Forks, where a lack of programs means families have to travel long distances west for services.
The South Fork saw a dire need after the suicides of three teens; both Senator Ken LaValle and Assemblyman Fred Thiele worked to garner funding to help address critical situations and reach kids before problems percolating since childhood reach a boiling point.
“The North Fork is concerned about not having the same issues, not having enough intensive intervention,” he said.
Beltz said both the town and school districts, through their representatives on the town’s youth bureau, recognized the dire need for services.
To that end, Beltz said he invited Weiss to discuss what he’d implemented on the South Fork.
Training would encompass three components, including critical incident stress debriefing, to “benefit the community at large” after any major incident such as fire, shooting or suicide. The FSL training would take place over two days and 14 hours, Beltz said. Other facets would include helping parents and educators to promote emotional well-being, identify potential issues early in a child’s life, and to be able to identify those at risk with an eye toward early intervention.
The youth bureau board would like to see the town offer five scholarships for training, Beltz said; a cost of $125 would include books and other materials.
Southold Police Chief Martin Flatley, Beltz said, supports the idea; Beltz said he’d like to include Community Action of Southold Town, town employees, members of the faith community and others in the training.
Weiss said in the past, the only option for a youth in crisis was to “put them in a car and travel 50 miles to Stony Brook, then return home. It was a waste of everyone’s resources, and provides nothing for the child but to make them agitated, sometimes sitting in a car in handcuffs. Not a good thing.”
The state, Weiss said, agreed to create a community coming together to address the crises; currently, two mental health clinics exist on the South For, meaning an “increase in treatment services to access to those services could happen more quickly.”
One tool is a community crisis action team, trained in suicide postventions, that works with survivors of a suicide, including family members, faculty, students, and others; the team responds quickly after any trauma, including fire or domestic violence, he said.
Weiss said in 2014, they handled 42 suicide calls in Suffolk County.
The program helps to give parents of a child with mental health issues an alternative to the long waiting lists at mental health clinics.
As it stands, Weiss said, 30 percent of the young people in the FSL’s seven mental health clinics are on medication.
“You don’t want to get to that point if you don’t have to,” Weiss said, adding that the hope is to identify signs of potential problems as early as six or eight years old. “Adults don’t just wake up one morning and decide to take their own lives. These are things that have been percolating,” he said. A lot of issues are family-related, he added.
Weiss said when invited by Southold’s youth bureau, he thought it would be a “great extension of what we are doing on the South Fork. Why not the entire East End? The North Fork has as many issues as the South Fork but the South Fork asked for helped first, and the state has been very generous. You have kids here that have the same problems and same issues.”
Once trained, individuals become part of a team that goes out on intervention; theirs is the only organization in Suffolk County that suicide postvention. Another tool, Safe Talk, is a nationally recognized approach to providing laypeople and students skills on how to listen when someone is in emotional distress; free workshops help to provide solutions.
“We have failed miserably with this mental health issue, as a society, for a long time,” Weiss said, adding that implementing training and change was a critical step.
Pediatric screenings of kids six to 18, with over 3,000 young people screened, indicate that 12 to 15 percent would score positive, with 75 percent of that number diagnosed, if there was no intervention, he said. “That’s a lot of kids. When you read in the paper about someone going beserk at 25, a loner, that’s what we’re trying to avoid,” Weiss said. “That 25-year-old was having problems at eight or nine.”
Beltz said local schools were all onboard and waiting for town board approval. The board said the training was a great idea and Beltz said he’d begin advertising the training and continue to reach out to school districts, including Fisher’s Island.
