The Tribune

By JEFFARAH GIBSON

Tribune Features Writer

jgibson@tribunemedia.net

WITH so many Bahamians suffering from grief, hurt or loss, the D & R Professional Counselling Centre found it necessary to offer free sessions to the general public.

Led by senior grief recovery specialist Delano Rolle, the D & R Professional Counselling Centre in the Pure Gold Plaza, Zion Boulevard, provides services in the areas of death counselling, pet loss, divorce, children and adolescents and pre-retirement, as well as grief workshops, communication seminars, group sessions, motivational speaking, one-on-one and emergency sessions.

“The first 50 persons in the community to contact our centre will receive free counselling sessions. Those sessions will be in area of grief, anger management, stress management, one-on-one motivation and coaching, cancer coaching and grief counselling,” Mr Rolle said.

“Whatever their issue is and whatever they require, we are going to be doing the free sessions for those individuals until the 50 sessions have been exhausted. So we are encouraging persons to come in and take advantage of the opportunity to have those free sessions.”

D & R Counselling was launched in October and is seeking to get the word out about its services. Mr Rolle said they also hope people who really need help will take advantage of the free sessions.

“We just launched our centre the end of October and we just realised the word of our services has not yet gone out the public, so what we are doing is public relations. We are also helping those persons who actually need counselling or legitimately can’t afford it,” he said.

Mr Rolle told Tribune Health that the centre’s aim is to also change the way Bahamians view counselling.

“I think generally as a society we have done a poor job of presenting counselling as a service in our country. In fact, our company is proud to actually be blazing a trail and being a pacesetter in the area of counselling in our country. For far too long we have only had psychiatric counselling and advanced psychology counselling. As far as general counselling goes, we are one of the first companies to offer such services,” he said.

“I think it is going to take a while for people’s mindsets to change and our country has (conditioned) us to believe that if you need counselling something is wrong with you. We have just painted a psychiatric picture to the people and so persons are afraid to do counselling because they feel they will be admitted to Sandilands Rehabilitation and be evaluated as a psychotic individual. But we want persons to know that counselling is here to help prevent a person from going further into psychosis. So we hope people see it as a necessity and something that is here to help,” Mr Rolle said.

The counselling sessions by D & R began yesterday.