CHESTER — What bystanders do passively can impact those suffering from mental health and addiction challenges, attendees learned Thursday.

The Brooke Hancock Prevention Alliance offered a free stigma training Thursday at its Chester location of the Family Resource Center in the city municipal building.

Continuing Education Credits (CEUs) were provided for social work, addiction and prevention professionals and licensed therapists.

The program focused mainly on stigmas impact the ability of mental health and substance use disorder sufferers’ ability to seek assistance, Amy Neeley of the Brooke Hancock Family Resource Network’s prevention and harm reduction department explained.

“We need to do everything to reduce the stigma (for them and family members),” she added. “Trauma is the real gateway to addiction.”

Attending the three-hour training session were representatives from the West Virginia Department of Corrections’ youth division as well as members of the host agency.

Neeley said, “Recovery is such a personal journey, and we need to remember addiction is a medical issue not a psychological failure.”

Speaker Lauren Kotz, an opioid response program administrator for the Youth Services System Inc. in West Virginia, oversaw the presentation.

As an example, Kotz explained how society in the 1940s tried to reteach left-handed individuals to instead be right-handed, seeing left-handedness as a deficiency.

She also asked the group to rattle off common stereotypes of people who reside in rural West Virginia and how those assumptions can damage their opportunities unjustly.

Forty-two million people have mental health struggles and just under half of those people also have addictions, which often are used to selfhelp those mental health issues.

“It is a case of which comes first, the chicken or the egg,” Kotz adds.

She also discouraged people of using terms like “junkie” or “addict” and instead referring a person to what they are: a individual with substance abuse issue, for example.

The importance of peer leadership in the conversation is important in diminishing the stigma. “Lead by example,” Kotz concluded.