Many a doctor will tell you that band aids and Tylenol are great cures but the best medicine is prevention.

You’ve seen me write already about taking care of yourself, your shipmates, co-workers, family and friends.  I’ve written about looking out for yourself, for planning ahead, for preventing adverse occurrences in your life.

However, there are times that, no matter how well you prevent or prepare, you’ll be faced with situations that are overwhelming or require special assistance. Navy Region Northwest and the Navy have many resources to help you, whether the issue is financial, medical, professional, or personal.

Today I want to focus on a great local resource, the Counseling Advocacy and Prevention Services program that’s part of the Community Support program. 

CAPS is dedicated to building healthy Navy families and sustaining a strong Navy community through comprehensive approaches in prevention, intervention, and training for individuals, families, and commands.

Let me outline a few of the programs that CAPS offers.

The counseling program offers individual, couple, and family counseling for active duty, retirees (on a space available basis) and their families. The family advocacy program offers an opportunity for individuals and families to learn how to better handle issues of violence within relationships and families. 

Victim advocacy is a program that offers confidential support and assistance for victims of domestic violence.  The Sexual Assault Victim Intervention (SAVI) program offers support and assistance to victims of sexual assault through the use of SAVI trained volunteer command representatives. 

The new parent support program and the parenting program are designed to assist new parents with issues surrounding newborns, parenting, and family relationships and offer classes that address parenting issues such as childbirth education, baby basics, communicating with children, and parenting. 

Finally, CAPS offers prevention programs focused on building healthy relationships, effective child rearing, promoting personal well being and addressing issues of domestic violence. Prevention programs are available to commands and groups as requested as well as ongoing programs addressing anger management, keeping children safe and stress management.

Every one of the programs above addresses an area of vital importance. My primary concern is your and your familyís well-being. Incidents of domestic violence or sexual assault undermine personal and family well-being and shatter command morale, esprit de corps, and mission effectiveness.  Likewise, the issues that the prevention programs are designed to address can have equally degrading effects both personally and professionally.

An additional resource is CAPS’ Combat Stress Program.  Designed to detect and address the physiological, behavioral, and psychosocial reactions experienced by individual augmentees before, during, and after combat, or duty in hazardous zones or at detainee facilities. 

The program offers briefs not only to the command, but also personally tailored briefs to the deployed and their families. The combat stress program also provide the IA, their family, and their supervisors with a basic understanding of the key combat stressors, which fall into four areas of emotional, mental, physical, and behavioral.

This is a great program and I urge every supervisor, IA, and family member to take advantage of this resource—the value of that support is immeasurable.

The CAPS program has assigned a specific representative for each command.  You can identify your command’s representative by contacting CAPS by one of the methods below.

If you want to reach the folks at CAPS, there are a lot of easy ways:

Via the Web: http://www.navylifepnw.com/site/33/CAPS.aspx

Via e-mail:

By telephone: 866-854-0638

In person: Building 97 on board Naval Base Kitsap, Keyport

Be prepared, stay prepared, and know that CAPS exists to not only help you be prepared, but help you in times of need.