Valor Station is hosting its second annual peer wellness seminar at Pine Knoll Farms Sept. 19-22.
This event is held to support law enforcement, peers, clinicians and doctors from around the country who devote their time to assisting officers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse disorders as a result of being involved in critical incidents.
“We came up with this peer wellness seminar to bring in clinicians and peers that are always there and willing to help their brother and sisters and give them a three-day relaxational kind of period,” said Cliff Richards, president of the Hale Foundation.
The Hale Foundation began in 1990 and offers programs to assist men with substance abuse problems. A vacant convent in the Green Meadows subdivision in south Augusta was donated to the organization a few years ago, and officials had hoped to use it as a treatment center for first responders. They called the proposed center Valor Station.
However, residents opposed the center, and the zoning was not approved by the commission. According to Richards, they now have begun converting an apartment building across from the Hale Foundation Campus downtown into a partial hospitalization program and intensive outpatient program for responders.
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This is the second year for the Valor Station peer wellness seminar.
According to Richards, the first year attracted about 30 participants from five different states. Richards says this year will be similar, and they will have participants from New York, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia and California.
“What we have seen the board across nationwide – it is really an epidemic that is really not publicized. We lose 400 to 500 first responders a year to suicide,” Richards said.
Suicide has also impacted the lives of first responders in the local area, he said.
“Since we started, we’ve lost five first responders to suicide – two Richmond County deputies, two firefighters and one GBI agent,” Richards said. “And that’s all we think directed to the trauma.”
The three-day wellness seminars are designed to help officers deal with trauma after critical incidents. Richards said these post-critical incident seminars were designed in the 1980s by the FBI, and he has been to seminars the last couple of years with the state office of public safety in Georgia.
Chris Rickerson is a staff reporter covering Columbia County government and general assignment topics for The Augusta Press. Reach him at chris@theaugustapress.com.
