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how prevention enhances the challenges life presents oneself is a subject that diana queely bergy is eminently qualified to address good morning um i started out in this field of mental health and substance abuse field research in utero my mother had bipolar depression she's an alcoholic my father had ptsd from world war ii violent alcoholic and i muddled through life for a long time i have 33 years of long-term recovery that means i learned the value of prevention i worked prevention for the first 10 years of my professional career and what i became fascinated with is i know the factors on why people end up where they end up i can do an intake i can do an asi i can tell you why the dsm-5 works but you know what we don't pay attention to the people that make it and we don't know why stopping and paying attention to what makes the difference why does this person die and this person somehow the resiliency is nurtured and they survive and they flourish by all accounts i should be sitting in prison or dead and i watch people that i love that i work with who are going to die from these illnesses from bipolar depression from schizophrenia from suicide from addiction and so i've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made the difference the things that make a difference and i think emmy warner and her research on resiliency captured it everybody can become resilient some people are more resilient than others what makes the difference one person who shows up and cares in an honest genuine way who has high expectations for you doesn't have to be a family member or a teacher it can be the local grocer carl rogers when he started developing his theory of personality and therapy he followed these kids around a residential treatment program trying to figure out why are these one kids getting better he found out they had someone they talked to the gardener the custodian somebody showed an interest in them and paid attention number one factor in prevention one person who cares so we can all do that now i was fortunate for a long time i worked in higher ed and i am a highly trained sensitive mental health professional [Laughter] but when i had a real job at the college it gave me the money and resources to do the work i love for free with some of the people who have nothing people coming out of prison who want to reenter the homeless folks at least once a week i go down and i sit by i-25 in center and i watch the homeless roll out from wherever they've hidden the night before under the underpass down by the river because i don't want to forget what it's like to be homeless and i think about that how did i get here well i had a grandmother who lived in a sheep wagon on the side of elk mountain the first year of her marriage and so when i was going to grad school and i didn't think we were going to get through no hot water no heat no back door on the trailer you know your adolescents don't fight with you and they think they're going to freeze to death at night the best years i had with my kids were the hardest years because we had to band together for survival but i'd look at that mountain and the weather in wyoming is always bad at elk mountain it is the road's closed it's closed at elk mountain it's just bad over there i always thought why didn't my great grandfather go 12 miles down the road to rock river where the weather's better that's where i settled rock river so i looked up there and i think she lived up there a full year first year of her marriage she had to have been late teens you know 18 19 years old no hot water no electricity in a sheep wagon and she did it and she was a formidable lady not warm and fuzzy her children called her mrs quayley right to the day she died nobody called her mom but i had those kind of people spotty through my life who nurtured resiliency as i tried to put my life back together i had people come across my path who showed an interest dick means worked up here for years and when i first came back to college i would study outside the counseling center because it was quiet and he'd come by every morning and he'd pat me on the head he'd never say a word he'd just acknowledge i was there and it made sure i showed up every day because i wanted someone to know i was there see that wasn't a big deal for him he was just on his way to go to the bathroom or get a cup of coffee but he always took a moment we forget that some of the most powerful pieces of prevention are when you take a moment to smile at that person who is in their most unlovable state that homeless person who's on the corner peeing on their shoes vomiting in the corner you can make a difference by just acknowledging this is a human being and but for the grace of god that could be me one time when i was incredibly suicidal i'm driving down i-25 fully committed to killing myself and my kids in the backseat of the car and somebody had graffitied jesus loved you on the overpass and i love that person i don't know who went out there and defaced public property but that moment stopped me and gave me just a minute to step back and make that phone call and somebody answered the phone now you've all heard that joke about calling the suicide hotline and being put on hold that actually happened to me i called the mental health center for help said i'm going to kill myself i'm going to kill my kids and the receptionist said just hold on a minute i'll get somebody and didn't come back like i think mine fall apart here so what we know from everything we've learned about resiliency is one person makes a difference we know a connection to your culture helps build resiliency now i am fortunate that many years ago i heard don coyas talk about the red road at an addictions conference and he mentioned these semi people out of norway and i thought well i have relatives from norway all my dad's family came from norway so i start researching and i find out that those are my ancestors see a lot of people think i walk the red road i do all this red road based recovery because i want to be a native my buddy millie over here where she's at she's coming up here in a minute i run into her at white bison trainings all the time white bison opened up the door for me to find out who am i and what's my culture as i became more and more familiar with who am i i found strength i found ancestors that overcame things much more harsh than i did culture is a key to prevention you got to know yours and you encourage people to know theirs my friend eduardo when he signs graduate students to do their research paper and multicultural counseling they have to go right up and research their creation story and unless you are jewish you don't get to use the one in genesis because that's the jewish creation story all of us have a creation story from our indigenous ancestors our history started a long time ago before they wrote it down you know that whole time frame of pre-history that they talk about we all have that but knowing our ancestry knowing who we are culture builds resiliency resilience is a key to prevention when i look out at a group of people i used to work with adolescents that were incredibly difficult and i didn't know which one of them was going to make it but the resiliency research tells me by age 32 three-quarters of them are going to be okay but i don't know which ones so i got to treat each and every one of them like they are the resilient one and by accident some of them get better when we take the time to really we can understand the disease we can understand the factors very important but if we want to engage in true prevention we want to nurture and build resiliency so one person who cares know your culture connections in your community when people feel isolated and alone they're at very high risk and it doesn't take much to make somebody feel like they belong i firmly believe the reason people go back to prison is not because they are institutionalized it's because they need some place they belong they know the rules it's familiar and they hate it you want to make a difference in recidivism there's this moment when they're sitting in county jail knowing where they're headed salmonell calls it the zero point that's when you intervene you don't let them sit there and get ready to go to prison you start then our jails are our title 25 holding cells most of the people in our jails have mental illness they have addiction and they're housed there and our county sheriffs tell me that all the time get these people out of my jail we can't help them i read the jail roster every day and i read the obituaries every day and i can tell you from that jail roster who is a chronic alcoholic and who has mental illness and who's gonna die and if i'm paying attention i can almost pick it within a month that's how predictable mental illness and substance abuse are and when someone makes a difference that jailer who shows an interest in the person can shift them to the path of resiliency all these volunteers that show up and the whole hug a thug program i'm a proud member of the hug a thug program and i have a buddy who wears a shirt that says hug this thug okay it doesn't take a lot i had a young man actually he's 42 he had fetal alcohol syndrome he's been on full disability since age nine his brother went to prison and said help him out will ya so this is what i did for the kid i took his text messages when he was sober once a month i picked him up and ran him to pick up his check pay his rent and get his phone card in his groceries that's it i didn't spend eight hours a month on this kid i kept him out of jail out of the emergency room got an attorney to pay help him get his fines paid off for two years that's a massive amount of money it's a hundred and one dollars a day to be in the trona county detention center that's how much money the county saved by me giving this kid eight hours a month not a big deal not a big deal to answer a text message and let him know someone remembers he's alive that's that is prevention taking that minute to show somebody you care we get so busy in our professional roles we think the only place treatment and prevention happen is in our office and the truth is it happens in the grocery store it happens on the street it happens at the laundromat it happens every time we show care and concern every time somebody steps up we are doing prevention the humane society has a program you come in and you read books to the cats and dogs that need to be socialized you can do that as a volunteer you want to enhance resiliency in grade school kids they need to know how to read to succeed in school take them down the humane society and have them read to these dogs and cats that's even easier than taking them to the nursing home to read old people okay this is not hard science to do these little things and we can all do that piece every time we look at a client and we see hope every time instead of counting the ones that die my buddy bob bragg walked out of his job because 100 people died i wish you'd kept track of how many lived there were thousands and i want to thank you for the work you do i'm here because of people like you and you need to pay attention to how big of an impact you create in the people that you cross paths with thank you