The Strength It Takes… to Talk About Suicide

Lock & Talk Virginia aims to emphasize the importance of locking up firearms as well as medication - the two main means of suicide in Virginia - especially when someone is in crisis. / Courtesy Lock & Talk Virginia

September is National Suicide Prevention Awareness Month - which will be recognized at Piedmont Virginia Community College through an event organized by the Lock & Talk Virginia campaign, brought by the Health Planning Region One Suicide Prevention Committee. WMRA's Marguerite Gallorini talked with its program coordinator Rebecca Textor.

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REBECCA TEXTOR: When we think about National Suicide Prevention Month, what we really want to do is to remember those we've lost to suicide and support those who are survivors of suicide; but also, give some hopeful messaging on things that we can do practically to help our community be safer from suicide.

That's Rebecca Textor, the program coordinator for the Lock & Talk Virginia campaign.

TEXTOR: That is mostly about lethal means safety and keeping firearms locked and safe, and also medication locked and safe. We know that the two main means of suicide in our region are going to be protected in a household.

Today [Friday, September 29] is their third annual event called "The Strength It Takes," at PVCC from 11 am to 3.30 pm. The speakers are Dr. Jerry Reed, Director of the National Suicide Prevention Resource Center, and Lt. Deuntay Diggs who will talk about his own difficulties growing up.

TEXTOR: He's also known as the dancing cop: he's actually been on America's Got Talent. He has a lot of energy and he wants to talk about getting through those hard times and then he's also going to speak about how he handles suicide behavior in law enforcement.

There will also be a one-hour training on the 3 simple steps in preventing suicide: Question, Persuade, and Refer. The event is free and you can still register on Eventbrite.com. You can also visit the website lockandtalk.org for more information about the year-long training they provide.

This story appeared on WMRA News.

A Canadian Approach to Opioid Problem

The conference "Best Practices in Community Mobilization in Response to Substance Use Epidemics," organized by UVa's Center for Global Health, aims at sharing ideas between Canada and the U.S. in addressing the opioid epidemic, especially in the field. / Photo: Marguerite Gallorini

What is the best practice to address the epidemics related to opioid use in Virginia – and in the nation? Last month, WMRA’s Marguerite Gallorini reported on alternatives to prescribing opiates.  This week, a group of Canadian health care professionals are in Charlottesville as part of a two-day conference on the subject organized by the Center for Global Health at UVa. Marguerite has more.

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Virginia’s HIV and Hepatitis C epidemic is closely linked to the opioid crisis, as people tend to share needles. But why look to Saskatchewan in Canada for answers? Here’s Kathleen McManus, assistant professor at UVa in Infectious Diseases and one of the organizers of this conference.

KATHLEEN MCMANUS: Doctor Dillingham [Director of the Center for Global Health] and I went to Saskatchewan two years ago and we were really impressed with our colleagues there with the work that they had achieved, and then it was really after that visit that we thought "The work they do here in Saskatchewan is so special that we want to be able to share this with our community."

The clinics she is referring to are that of Big River and Athahkakoop. Professionals from these two health centers came to talk about their experience in dealing with epidemics related to substance abuse. Dr. Stuart Skinner says Saskatchewan has had the highest rate of HIV in Canada for the past 10 years, and it especially affects First Nation reserves. His answer:  

STUART SKINNER: The most important is meeting people where they're at. My approach is to make care as accessible as we can, especially for the most vulnerable population who struggle with transportation, poverty - to try and get a tertiary care center or a city for health care is often difficult and intimidating. Canadians or Americans both should look at that model and obviously, for what I do in a rural province with lots of distance, we need to reach out to them and ensure that they get the same opportunities to access health services and treatment as everyone else.

That is the key idea: community outreach. Dr. Skinner got involved early with the Know Your Status program developed by the Big River Health Center. Federal nurse Leslie-Ann Ironstand-Smith has been nursing there for 18 years.

LESLIE-ANN IRONSTAND-SMITH: Our program does not create dependency: it creates ownership. This is your addiction: “We're going to walk with you on this journey. But it's yours. You're going to tell me what you want to do for your journey. Do you want to engage in care right now, do you want to wait?” Our first positive client we tested had 23 contacts, 19 of those contacts were positive for HIV. So we knew we were having an issue. Because they're sharing needles, and this was from a sharing episode of one night. Social networking and then peeling through the layers of the client's addiction is huge to get that bigger population - and that comes with trust and respect.

Could Virginia apply this program, with a radically different American health care insurance system as opposed to that in Canada?

SKINNER: Certainly, universal health coverage takes barriers away in having accessible care where cost isn't an issue.

NOREEN REED: Partnerships are huge, in every aspect from your clients to your higher level of people. I can't stress that enough. And another thing is advocating for our clients, advocating for better services.

That’s nurse Noreen Reed from the Athahkakoop Health Center – located about 10 miles away from Big River. Their first step was to put in place a needle exchange program, to give clean needles to people with addiction in exchange of their used ones.*

REED: Even still to this day there's a lot of questions around it from community members, but it's a matter of educating. They even went and did a puppet show to talk about needle safety. It's a community-wide education process and then showing the benefits.

And the benefits are real: according to a systematic review of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, these programs have reduced HIV prevalence in New York from 50 to 17 percent, and from 80 to 59 percent for Hepatitis C. In Virginia, following the declaration of public health emergency, a new law legalizing these programs went into effect on July 1, although none has been started yet.

Note: An earlier edition of this story claimed that "As in Virginia, their [clients of Athahkakoop Health Center] primary cause of HIV infection is drug use via injections." That is incorrect. In Virginia, sexual contact is still the main cause of HIV transmission.

This story appeared on WMRA News.

Why Monuments Matter

The Robert E. Lee statue in Charlottesville's Emancipation Park, covered by tarp for an indefinite period of time in mourning of Heather Heyer, killed by a white supremacist terrorist on August 12. / Photo: Marguerite Gallorini

Frank Dukes, a fellow at the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at UVa, is one of two presenters at an event today at JMU called "Why Confederate Monuments Matter: Charlottesville and Beyond."  WMRA's Marguerite Gallorini has this report.

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Frank Dukes is an expert on the issues of monuments and memorials.  He’s been involved in a number of projects and commissions in Charlottesville.

FRANK DUKES: We have a project here called "Transforming Community Spaces" which is intended to help institutions and communities that see they have these problematic spaces and they need to figure out ways to address them, how they can tell more complete histories.             

Today’s [Tuesday, Sept. 26] talk at JMU will focus on how Confederate monuments help reinforce different narratives of white supremacy, and lessons that we can learn from Charlottesville – and that can be applied everywhere, not just in the U.S. What does he hope will come out of today’s conversation?

DUKES: I hope people will recognize that many of our community spaces tell histories that are in fact incomplete, and often outright falsehoods. Once we understand that, we're better able to understand why our communities look the way that they do, why we have so much racial segregation, why we have so many really pernicious and harmful racial disparities.

And what about the argument that removing one statue is a slippery slope to getting rid of many more?

DUKES: I hope there will be a question like that because I can give three answers: one is, I don't think there is any statue limitations on truth and honesty in history, so we're always learning new elements of that. A second one is that if you look at Monticello and Montpelier, with Jefferson and James Madison, and Highland locally with Hames Monroe: they're all telling different stories than they did just a couple of decades ago but nobody's talking about tearing down Monticello or tearing down Montpelier or tearing down Highland. And I think a third thing is we're not celebrating Jefferson because he enslaved people. We're celebrating him for things like the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, or the Declaration of Independence. That's different than monuments that actually celebrate people whose renown comes from their work to continue slavery or whatever problematic other elements there are.

This story appeared on WMRA News.

'Tomtoberfest' Is Here!

Tomtoberfest is here! Today and tomorrow, the Tom Tom Fall festival is celebrating creative community and local innovation with, among other things, two free days of concert at Emancipation Park in Charlottesville. WMRA's Marguerite Gallorini talked with founder Tom Beyer about how the fall’s events differ from the big festival in the Spring.

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PAUL BEYER: Tomtoberfest is the Fall festival for the Tom Tom Founders Festival. The fall is more of a local, kind of a time to turn back to Charlottesville and also increasingly Virginia, and say "What is it that makes our cities here in Virginia ready for the new economy, ready for the culture"? The Fall festival is really a celebration of the local contemporary founders that are shaping Charlottesville.

Paul Beyer is the founder and director of the Tom Tom Festival.

BEYER: It really kind of goes back to what Tom Tom's roots are, and what we've tried to do for years which is bring the community together in a diverse and inclusive way. It really is something that is intended to appeal to everybody.

Tomtoberfest has always taken place in Emancipation Park, which was formerly called Lee Park, and is the location of the controversial statue of Robert E. Lee. Paul says this year’s Tomtoberfest will be all the more important following the summer’s events.

BEYER: I think having a reminder that there've been these inspiring civic leaders that have spent decades trying to build really positive things in the city is a really important narrative to tell at this point. I think especially as we go back to Emancipation Park, and say "That's not what we want this city to be about."

On top of the free concerts this weekend, today they also have the Fall Forum, looking at the new Virginia economy; and on Saturday night, they'll have a check presentation from the city's Heart campaign for the Heal Charlottesville Fund, raising money for the victims of August 12.

This story appeared on WMRA News.

Counseling and Wellness After '8/12' in Charlottesville

On Our Own is a peer-based non-profit, and part of the Community Mental Health and Wellness Coalition,
providing free services to Charlottesville residents following the trauma of 8/12. / Photo: Marguerite Gallorini 

One month ago three people died in Charlottesville in a violent day of white supremacist hatred and violent clashes with counter-protesters.  But how does the community heal after such a trauma? Several groups are providing free counseling and wellness services to the residents of Charlottesville who have been affected in one way or another by the violence of that weekend. WMRA’s Marguerite Gallorini has more.

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4:32 - or download the podcast via Through Gallo Eyes Media

[Crowd shouting]

Political anger and frustration persist in Charlottesville – as does the community’s need to process the tragic events of that day, and heal. That’s why free counseling and wellness services are being offered around town.  

[Zen music]

Soft music and tranquility greets anyone entering Common Ground Healing Arts.

ELLIOTT BROWN: We do acupuncture, yoga, massage, and meditation on a pay-what-you-can ranges basis.

Elliott Brown is the Executive Director of this non-profit wellness center located on the second floor of the Heritage Center in Charlottesville. She saw the benefits of this therapy herself.

BROWN: I was down at the rally on August 12th and - never really experiencing trauma much myself - I wasn't aware of the power of the body work that we do on that level. We had set up some free services in conjunction with the Women's Initiative; I went over there and had some body work - specifically called zero-balancing, it's kind of massage but it has some energy work in it as well. And so once I had that, I thought everybody needed to have access to that.

That’s how the idea of creating the Cville Wellness Fund came up.

BROWN: Our goal is to be able to offer free services to everybody who needs it, but the money has to come first, so we're slowly rolling that out and people are receiving services. We've raised a little bit over $2000... We've quietly set this off because we don't want to compete with the other go-fund-me accounts that some of the victims have put up.

Cali Gaston, an acupuncturist who has been working at Common Ground for three years now, thinks it is a wonderful initiative.

CALI GASTON: I think that the intervention early on after trauma so that it doesn't lodge in us is very important, and the five-needle protocol that we use is the same thing that Acupuncturists Without Borders uses - they used it after Katrina to work on first responders - it's a very lovely way of helping support somebody. It's sort of like hitting the reset button.

Not far from Common Ground, you will find an old house on 4th Street called On Our Own. It is a peer-based non-profit, and here the mood is very convivial.

CYNDI RICHARDSON: Yes, the yellow house of miracles. We're a small mom and pop, but we do big things. Cyndi Richardson is a certified peer support specialist at On Our Own.

RICHARDSON: A traditional therapist may say "Tell me how that makes you feel." Here at On Our Own, we say "I know that's how that feels, this is what I did when that happened to me." See, there's a common bond, so that's what we do: we provide support through our experience.

Since August 12, Richardson says they’ve had to amp up their groups.

RICHARDSON: We have fragile beings here. We have found that, so many times, we go through things and we are told "it's not that bad, get over it, you'll be okay." We found what that does: it compounds, and it builds and it builds, until you explode, in one way or another - mentally, physically: it's going to come out. So why not come out in an easy, releasing way?

Bill Johnson, who’s come to On Our Own for about 7 months now, has seen a huge difference.  He especially likes how the members of this house are connected beyond social categories.

JOHNSON: The socio-economic differences outside the house are no longer present in the house - or racial differences, religious differences, whatever artificial ways that we separate ourselves. There's much more connectivity with being human, shared experiences.

Another provider of more traditional therapy is the Counseling Alliance of Virginia, a community-based, outpatient mental health clinic in n orthern Charlottesville. They also provide massage therapy, and Reiki, says Gene Cash, the CEO and Executive Director of the center.

GENE CASH: What we're seeing right now, just recently is first, the initial reaction to August 12: the anger, the frustration, the disbelief. And right now we're starting to see people, we'll hear from people more about "Oh, I thought I was doing okay, but these thoughts, these memories are starting to intrude, I think I need to come in and talk to somebody."

That’s for the individual sessions they provide. But they also have group support sessions on Tuesday nights.

CASH: 8-12, as they call it, that was an event. What I'm looking to capture is the momentum that's been going on for years in this community – of communicating how we can help heal every day, not just from 8/12.

For more free counseling and wellness therapy options, you can visit the Facebook page of the Community Mental Health and Wellness Coalition.

This story appeared on WMRA News.

Investigative Journalism in the Age of Trump

From left to right: Matthew Rosenberg (NYT), Michael Schmidt (NYT), Stephen Engelberg (ProPublica),
and Vera Bergengruen (BuzzFeed News) share their experience of investigative reporting in D.C.
under the Trump administration. / Photo: Marguerite Gallorini

What is the current - and future - state of investigative journalism under the new Trump administration? To try to answer to this question and many more, the Miller Center in Charlottesville invited a panel of prominent investigative journalists from The New York Times, ProPublica and BuzzFeed News. WMRA's Marguerite Gallorini was there.

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4:49 - or download the podcast via Through Gallo Eyes Media

MICHAEL SCHMIDT: I think that folks think that what we do is perhaps a little easier than it looks. There's some notion out there that we sit in our desks, the phone rings, there's some dark deep voice...

(STEPHEN ENGELBERG: Bannon here!)

That’s Michael Schmidt, a correspondent for The New York Times in D.C., who broke the story of Hillary Clinton’s private e-mails.

SCHMIDT: They give it to us, and we just... you type it up and you put it online. It's incredibly more complex and difficult than that.

Schmidt and three other journalists discussed what it’s like to be an investigative reporter in the age of Trump. The first thing is: there’s a lot of criticism to take in.

SCHMIDT: There's also two large megaphones that have a big impact on us, the first being the President, who has used the media as a thing to attack to build himself up; and the second thing is Fox News, which, for almost two decades now, has been blaring commentary about the mainstream media that is incredibly critical. Whether it's true or not, there's an enormous amount of people that watch that and take that in. And it's not something, I think, we've completely figured out how to respond to.

Criticism comes from the left too.

SCHMIDT: If you do a story in which Trump spouts off and you repeat what he says and maybe the reader doesn't think you hold him accountable enough, then we get criticized for that.

VERA BERGENGRUEN: I think we just can't win, right?

That’s Vera Bergengruen, national security correspondent for BuzzFeed News.

BERGENGRUEN: If there's this reporting in a certain a way, then we get a lot of criticism saying "You're normalizing this," saying that we don't provide enough context into how unusual some of this is; and on the other side, again, they're like "Why are you focusing - there's nothing there, why do you keep going there?" Anytime you touch any of those topics, no side is really going to be happy with this... The example is, Mike who’s – he covered the Clinton e-mail server and also broke several stories about Trump, that's what a good investigative journalist does.

For Matthew Rosenberg, who covers intelligence and national security for The New York Times, this kind of criticism is particularly dangerous because it contains an element of censorship.

MATTHEW ROSENBERG: It’s a dangerous place for people on either the right or left to be saying "These views are so terrible nobody should know about them." I think we're all probably four free speech absolutists up here.

A member of the audience expressed the concern that this panel was representing only one side of the political spectrum.

SPEAKER: I know The Times would be viewed as a more leftward-leaning publication. But are any of you on a conservative outlet?

[Laughs]

SPEAKER: I take that as a no.

SCHMIDT: I think the description of The Times is a liberal publication; but when I tell people I wrote the Hillary Clinton email story, that can sometimes rattle people – because they’re like “Wow, that’s what The New York Times wrote.” As reporters on this story, we're out there following the facts regardless.

Stephen Engelberg, the editor in chief of the non-profit publication ProPublica, provided an introspective thought.

ENGELBERG: I do think that subconsciously – journalists are people – and if a guy is screaming at you every day that you are the enemy of the people, does it have some kind of subliminal effect on how you come to work in the morning? Probably so. As an editor, I try to make sure that’s not true, I try to be very careful.

ROSENBERG: We really do try to be fair and balanced as one can be. Look, I do think there is an issue where the media is largely based in big cities – not everybody is from big cities but they've relocated there, working there – so you tend to reflect the kind of values of urban America.

This divide between big cities and local journalism was also touched upon by Howard Witt, the Miller Center's Director of Communications and moderator of the panel.

HOWARD WITT: Let's take it down to the local level because there is such a divide between the resources that major national news organizations, like you folks, represent; and the local newspapers that so many Americans still depend on to get a lot of their news. Here in Charlottesville we have one newspaper that is under incredible economic stress – and they get a hot tip about some big local story going on right now, and they don't have the resources to put against that.

ENGELBERG: Yes, we have a huge problem. The newspaper advertising model is dead; it seems to me that is now not become a civic good - it's become a commercial imperative. What that means is that newspapers have to move to a subscription model. And at the local level that means you’ve got to create an absolutely imperative reason for people to buy the paper, and that means investigative accountability reporting. When I worked at the Oregonian I used to say "Could I just have, from our readers, one latte a week?" If we could get there, I think there is hope; but at the moment you're right, there's a big problem, and the problem is much more at the local level than the national level.

Unfortunately, the panel did not mention the importance of also supporting one’s local public radio station. 

This story appeared on WMRA News.

Filling in American History

Shetterly gave a lecture on her book at the Paramount Theater as part of UVa’s Engagement Lecture Series. It was followed by a Q/A, a book signing and a screening of the three-time Academy Award nominated movie based on her book. / Photo: Marguerite Gallorini

Margot Lee Shetterly is the author of the New York Times bestseller Hidden Figures, about the true story of a group of black female mathematicians working at NASA and helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology – although no textbook acknowledges their work. She discussed her novel yesterday at the Paramount Theater, in a lecture part of UVa’s Engagement Lecture Series. WMRA’s Marguerite Gallorini reports.

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Writing this book was a matter of broadening the American story to include all of its actors, according to Margot Lee Shetterly, author of the book Hidden Figures.

MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY: We have had, for a long time, a very narrow idea of American History, and I think this expands that. So, I really hope that what this does is encourage people to look beyond the current boundaries for American History.

She presented her book at the Paramount Theater, followed by a book signing and a screening of the movie based on her book, nominated 3 times at the Academy Awards. During her lecture, she mentioned the absence of Black voices in Charlottesville’s own History.

SHETTERLY: I believe one of the reasons why the push to remove these statues is so strong right now, is because the statues symbolize an absence: the absence of tales of not just Black lives, but American lives, like the residents of the Black Vinegar Hill neighborhood here in Charlottesville, where the statues were built. That absence has created a powerful vacuum and that vacuum is trying urgently to absorb the stories of people like Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden.

These are the Black women of her book, who worked at the NASA research center in Hampton, VA, helping with the Space Race. Shetterly now lives in Charlottesville, but she is a native of Hampton – and even there, people had never heard of these ladies’ scientific contribution.

Margot Lee Shetterly during the book signing
event. / Photo: Marguerite Gallorini

SHETTERLY: All the time on the streets of Hampton, VA, I ran into people who lived down the street from Dorothy Vaughan, or they went to church with Katherine Johnson; and though those people knew the women, they, too, were asking me: Why didn't I know this story? One of the obvious reasons is that the Black women were literally hidden away in a separate office from the White women. The women, regardless of their race, were given a lower classification, they were paid less than the male engineers - and that's even if they were doing the same work - that meant that the women's contributions were barely acknowledged, much less celebrated.

Before learning about all this, she says she had been living too close to it to fully appreciate the historical significance of the work of these women mathematicians.

SHETTERLY: Growing up there, I had the very good fortune to see Black – or female – mathematicians, scientists, and engineers as totally normal people. They were as normal as the White male mathematicians and scientists and engineers.

That’s a point that Professor Lisa Woolfork, from UVa’s department of English underlined during the Q/A session.

LISA WOOLFORK: What you've done in the story so powerfully, is to, as you said – that for you growing up, normal was: Black, female, scientist, and have them not be three different people. That one person, you Sunday school teacher for example, or your mother's sorority sisters: these were women that did this all the time, and this was normal for you. And I just find that that is such an important new default setting, and it allows us to think about the larger picture of America as something that is not limited to very small segments of the population. And now, here we are, at this wonderful place, this wonderful time in our History, where we get a chance to look back at that History squarely, and figure out where we've been, and what we want to do differently.

Shetterly agrees.

SHETTERLY: What happened here in Charlottesville a month ago has a lot to do with what’s happening in the country now, but it also has to do with the History. I think we cannot run away from the History, that we really have to face it; and if we do that, it gives us a much greater chance of achieving those goals that are written into our Constitution, our founding documents. I think that, as painful as it is, perhaps it's an opportunity to address some of those dormant conversations.

This story appeared on WMRA News.

Can This UVa Law Project Improve Criminal Justice?

Law Professor Brandon Garrett /
Photo Courtesy of UVa.

A new project at UVa's law school aims to improve the criminal justice system, based on a thorough study of criminal justice data. WMRA's Marguerite Gallorini talked to Professor Brandon Garrett, a member of the project’s leadership team.

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Wrongful convictions, false confessions, mental health: these are some of the issues of interest for the Virginia Criminal Justice Policy Reform Project, from the UVa School of Law. Professor Brandon Garrett, specializing in criminal law, is one of its founders.

BRANDON GARRETT: The goal of this project is to look across the entire criminal justice system in Virginia, and look at the places where we could collect data or we could have better-informed and more evidence-based solutions, and we thought that policy-makers would welcome that – judges as well, or Commonwealth attorneys and defense lawyers.

He teamed up with Professors John Monahan, a psychologist who works on risk assessment in sentencing, and Richard Bonnie, who focuses on mental illness and criminal justice. For its first year, the project received a $145,000 grant from the Charles Koch Institute, to research sentencing of non-violent offenders.

GARRETT: There are certain offenders in Virginia, where judges have the option of giving them an alternative to incarceration. But judges don't always follow those recommendations. We just want to get a better sense of the practice because there are many thousands of people that are potentially affected.

The Law School will start a new Spring course to involve students as well. They will collect data and research concrete problems of Virginia’s criminal justice system, and make policy recommendations on those.

GARRETT: We're also hoping to do work at the intersection of mental health and criminal justice. For example this past summer, they started doing mental health screenings at the jails in Virginia, and so there are opportunities to study how some of those changes are being implemented in the field.

This story appeared on WMRA News.