Rockville Centre's Confide reaches out to veterans

The Confide Counseling and Consultation Center is expanding both its facilities and its services, opening a new inter-generational treatment track for veterans and their families.

Despite delays in obtaining the day-to-day operating funds that Nassau County is charged with distributing — a problem that Confide deals with nearly every year — the Rockville Centre-based substance abuse agency received additional state facility funds last year that enabled it to expand into a spacious and bright new suite of offices in the basement of its current address, 30 Hempstead Ave. It is also rehabilitating and will reoccupy its original offices, which are just steps down the hallway from the new suite.

“As a result of having more space, we felt that there is an inherent social obligation to provide services to veterans and their families who have substance abuse issues in their lives,” Art Rosenthal, the center’s executive director, said as he announced that Confide will now provide veterans with all of the outpatient substance abuse services it currently offers, including individual, group, family, post-traumatic stress and reunification counseling. No veteran will be turned away from treatment because of an inability to pay, Rosenthal said, and services will be expedited for combat veterans.

Heading up the new program is its project director, Bob Raphael, 65, a Marine Corps combat veteran who served two tours in Vietnam. Raphael is active in veterans’ affairs, and recently led a successful effort to institute federal initiatives for at-risk homeless veterans and their families. Raphael, who lives in Manhattan and came out of retirement last fall to start the Confide program, also ran a clinical substance abuse program at Long Island College Hospital.

“The credo of the Vietnam Veterans of America,” said Raphael, who is a member, “is ‘Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.’ Many of us feel a special obligation to the younger veterans of Iraq, Afghanistan and the first Persian Gulf war. We work with them, and we won’t abandon them.

“Veterans want to be around veterans,” he added. “It creates credibility. In 40 years, it’s become clear that while there’s a need for professional intervention, when you’re talking about substance abuse, post-traumatic stress and combat trauma, veterans respond well to each other. There’s a bond that’s almost immediate. There’s a shorthand nomenclature.”

A big issue for many returning from war, Raphael explained, is reintegration. “They don’t feel that they’ve come home,” he said. “They’re still identifying with their roles in combat, and their reintegration into both their families and the labor force is fraught with difficulty.”

“If you remove somebody from the greater society by putting them into combat, a hospital or a prison,” Rosenthal explained, “re-entry into the world they left is an unusually traumatic event because things have changed. They have a sense of some real loss, and the people who work with them must understand that.

“The behavioral changes can cause them to conjure up the most dangerous experience they recently had, when they stop, for example, at a red light or get caught in slow-moving traffic,” Rosenthal added. “It’s not that they’re impatient to get where they’re going; they actually feel threatened. Hyper-vigilance, the need to look around and see if you’re being threatened, and the whole issue of self-medication — that’s what brings them to Confide.”

Of Raphael and the new program, which can easily accommodate 15 to 20 clients with room for more, Rosenthal said, “I don’t think we could have gotten a better person to do this job [than Bob] because of his personal and technical experience.”

While the program is up and running, ready to help veterans, Rosenthal and Raphael are also busy networking, pulling together various stakeholders in Nassau County with whom they will work — the Veterans Center in Hicksville and various veterans’ associations and groups. They are scheduled to visit the Veterans Resource Center in the American Legion Post on Maple Avenue on Friday, and former Police Commissioner Jack McKeon, a Confide board member who is also active in veterans’ affairs, will introduce them to the center’s volunteers.

Furthering Confide’s longstanding partnership with the law-enforcement community, Rosenthal and Raphael are reaching out to Judge Terence Murphy, who oversees the Nassau County Veterans Treatment Court. Murphy, a veteran who is in the Army Reserves, “has impressed everyone with his commitment and sincerity toward the plight of veterans who run afoul of the law,” Rosenthal said.

“It’s a natural fit for Confide to work with the law-enforcement community and the veterans community,” Raphael said. “The two communities overlap and have a lot of issues that overlap.”

Raphael said he sees the program playing a role in helping older veterans as well. “What I would hate to see is the Vietnam veteran population being abandoned a second time,” he said. “There are particular needs of [that] generation that are not being met because of the economy and cutbacks in social programs they would access. New generations of veterans are facing the issues of reintegration. The older generation of veterans is facing issues of disintegration — job loss, family loss, illness.”

Rosenthal sees the common thread as well. “As a community service in Rockville Centre,” he said, “Confide can address the substance abuse and co-occurring conditions that senior veterans and newly returning veterans both face.”