CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) - Prompted by a friend, Jermaine Saunders called the statewide substance abuse and mental health call line, and Jaimee Moffitt picked up.
“She was very helpful - the first thing she said to me was ’What can I do to help?’ That was something I’d been waiting to hear for a while,” Saunders told The Charleston Gazette-Mail (bit.ly/1Y3TEMd). “There was no judgment. I had been battling the disease for over three years. I was addicted to opiates.”
Two months after the call, Saunders is in rehab at Recovery Point, the men’s long-term, peer-to-peer rehabilitation center in Huntington.
He was connected with Recovery Point with the aid of Moffitt and 844-HELP4WV, the statewide 24-hour substance abuse and mental health call line, launched six months ago as a way to connect West Virginians with recovery services in the region.
The call line has received 1,100 calls since launching in September.
HELP4WV is a collaborative effort between First Choice Health Systems and the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources.
The helpline is funded by a $550,000 annual grant from the West Virginia Bureau for Behavioral Health and Health Facilities.
It offers substance abuse and mental health treatment referrals, appointment reminders, directions to treatment facilities and transportation assistance. It also provides follow-up calls after the first treatment appointment, the first month and first three months of treatment.
The helpline has medical personnel on site at all times and the ability to dispatch local police officers to perform safety checks.
“We like to do 48-hour, one-week and one-month follow-ups, and the reason we do that is because we want the person to know that there’s somebody out there who cares about them and wants to see them succeed, but we also want to make sure they went to their appointment,” said Moffitt, a substance abuse counselor.
“If they didn’t go to the detox or to their appointment, we want to know why, because we report everything in our database to the Governor’s Office, and that helps us see a little more on where the gaps in treatment are, whether it’s insurance, transportation or they just didn’t feel ready. Whatever the reason, we want to know, so we can try to fill in those gaps.”
The line has received calls from 54 of West Virginia’s 55 counties, and a majority of the help line’s callers are from the southern part of the state, according to Jeremy Smith, outreach coordinator for First Choice.
“The calls are picking up more and more every month; I think a lot of people didn’t really understand how useful the call line would be when it was first launched, and now we’re seeing some really great success,” Smith said. “Before, when people wanted to find treatment for substance issues, they really had no idea how to start the process, so they might make one or two calls they knew of near them, get discouraged and stop looking.”
First Choice is able to connect callers to one of more than 900 treatment facilities across the state, Smith said.
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Information from: The Charleston Gazette-Mail, https://wvgazettemail.com.
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