Mental health event planned for veterans
A mental health awareness event for veterans will be held on the campus of National Park College on Thursday with a focus on post-traumatic stress disorder and its effects.
The free Veterans Mini-Mental Health Summit of the Ouachitas will be held from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Thursday in the Frederick M. Dierks Center for Nursing and Health Sciences. Presentations will be led in the Dr. Martin Eisele Auditorium. Lunch will be provided at noon for free by The Bridgeway service provider in North Little Rock.
The United States Department of Veterans Affairs Regional Office in Little Rock previously held mental health events and encouraged the state’s individual regions to host their own. Amy Thomason, community liaison for Arkansas Hospice and volunteer for the Veterans Community Partnership of the Ouachitas, said the summit will examine PTSD from several angles.
“Number one, how it affects or is affected by homelessness,” Thomason said. “The second one is the court system for veterans, which is getting better. It is getting a lot better.”
“That is a relatively new, like the drug court that Judge (Ralph) Ohm and Judge (David) Switzer worked with,” said Betty Smith, a local nurse and volunteer for the Partnership.
Thomason and Jennifer Hollis, with the Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System, will discuss veteran homelessness at 9:45 a.m. A panel including Garland County District Court Judge Meredith Switzer, and Stephen Ezelle, Veterans’ Outreach Program specialist, will discuss veteran treatment courts at 11 a.m.
The third aspect is suicide prevention. Susie Reece, violence prevention specialist for CHI St. Vincent Hot Springs and executive director of Suicide Prevention Allies, will lead a presentation at 1:15 p.m. Reece and other specialists will lead a panel discussion after her presentation.
“She is pretty passionate about suicide prevention,” Thomason said. “That is just a huge by-product of PTSD. We knew that needed to be some of it, but we know not
everybody gets to that stage.”
“You see it in so many different ways, how it comes and the things it leads to,” Smith said. “We talked about how mental health is affecting our veterans and the lives our veterans have or do not have because they are so caught up in the things that come out of PTSD.
“We talked about what are the most significant areas we need to address and what does PTSD manifest as. So many people do not even realize they really have a diagnosis of PTSD because they have always lived with it and hid it. In our chatting and trying to break it down, we knew we wanted Susie to do the suicide prevention. So many families are affected by suicide, even if they are not veterans.”
Guests can register at https://
www. event b rite. com/e/ veterans min i-mental-health-summit-of the-ou ac hit as-tickets -35824750794, but registration is not required. Resource tables will be available to offer information about local services.
Visitors and organizations who would like to attend should call Thomason at 501-318-9992 or email a thomas on@ arkansas hospice. org. Organizations can present table sat the summit for free.
Chaplains associate with the Veterans Affairs office in Little Rock previously traveled throughout the state with veterans clergy partnerships to meet with area veterans. Thomason said the chaplains were no longer able to fulfill the same commitments about six years and individual regions were tasked with developing their own partnerships.
The Veterans Community Partnership of the Ouachitas was established to serve Garland, Hot Spring, Montgomery, Clark, Pike and Howard counties. Chaplains still support veterans throughout the state, but partnerships are now coordinated by local volunteers.
Members of the partnership meet on the third Wednesday every month at 11 a.m. at Smokin’ In Style BBQ, 2278 Albert Pike Road. Susan Millerd, behavioral intervention specialist at NPC, invited the Partnership to utilize the college for the summit.
Volunteers plan to collect donations of nonperishable items to distribute to local veterans at a later date. The items will be stored at Rector Heights Baptist Church, where Smith’s husband, Mike Smith, has been pastor for the past two decades.