A miss-dialed phone number has led to a blessing for the Poplar Bluff community that continues to pay off this December, as local officials partner with Johns Hopkins to offer a course Tuesday on mental health and the holidays.
One of the key activities coming up in conjunction with this project is an event called Surviving the Holidays, which will be held from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Tuesday. The event will be hosted at the Twin Towers in Poplar Bluff in the community room.
It will be co-hosted by Barbara Horton, the Ward 3 city council representative.
“It was the best wrong number that I ever dialed is how I like to phrase it,” said Dr. Daniel Barnett of Johns Hopkins, Bloomberg School of Public Health, whose relationship with Butler County Health Department began many years ago when he was trying to reach a health department in Butler County, Ohio.
Barnett is excited to be able to discuss initiatives that he and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins are coordinating with the Butler County Health Department and surrounding health departments in Southeast Missouri.
“Specifically, this project that we are working on together is based on a process called psychological first aid, which is the idea that it’s kin to basic CPR for mental health,” said Barnett.
This process looks at self-care, when someone needs to seek further mental health support, communication techniques and other topics.
Horton has taken the role as the advocate champion of seniors in our community, explained Butler County Emergency Management Agency Director Robbie Myers.
“Just like she took the seat that had been occupied by former mayor Betty Absheer, she now takes care of seniors in an unofficial capacity,” he said.
When asked why this project was important to her, Horton said, “My family, through my life, has experienced mental health issues. We’ve all struggled and tried to overcome them and through this process, I’ve learned that you can help yourself by being positive and looking for the positive and helping others.”
This program uses what is called Public Health Service extenders, to help departments to deliver psychological first aid to seniors who may need it.
As most know, holidays can be some of the most stressful times of the year. The Surviving the Holidays project seeks to ease some of the mental burdens on seniors.
“I try to find people, no matter whether they’re seniors or young, or that maybe just a smile that day makes them feel better,” said Horton. “This is something that has been important to me the majority of my life, but it took me many decades to learn how to be positive about it.”
Horton went on to say, “I think we as a community need to realize how blessed we are to have something with John Hopkins. Most communities our size don’t have something like this and it’s because of the health center, Robbie and different things that we have these advantages.”
Organizers hope people will utilize this opportunity to the fullest extent.
“You have lots of good teamwork of different entities working together here,” said Myers. “We just want to get the word out so that people who are in need of these services will attend.”
The story of how this mental health project came to grace the area is a unique and fortuitous one, according to Barnett
“Several years ago, around 2008, I was leading a project funded by the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention, CDC. That was a preparedness-related research project looking at the willingness of public health workers to respond in disasters,” he said.
This is way before COVID, explained Barnett, who was working to recruit health departments from different regions of the country.
“In the course of recruiting, I called what I thought was the Butler County, Iowa Health Department,” he said, laughing. “Thankfully, it was, as I mentioned, the best wrong number I’ve ever dialed because the person who picked up was (former Butler County Health Department Director) Robert Hudson, who was just an incredible health officer. He was the health officer for Butler County Health Department (at that time) and sadly passed a couple of years ago.
“But he wound up being a terrific champion for this CDC project. And that work that we did together on that project led to subsequent collaborations leading up to today’s collaboration that we’re working on with psychological first aid.”
Barnett explained psychological first aid is an important tool to enhance community mental health.
“What’s exciting among many things about this project is that we are using psychological first aid to address health equity needs for seniors — for older adults in Missouri, by providing training for public health workers emergency medical services, workers and faith-based workers to deliver psychological first aid interventions in Southeastern Missouri,” he said.
Barnett went on to explain the reason this is such a timely initiative is because, “We know very well from the literature that there just are not enough psychiatrists and psychologists to deliver mental health services nationwide.
“And this problem is of course acute in more rural areas as well”