Compeer Joins Hands to Bring Down Mental Health Hurdles

When Caroline Sorenson first met Marcella Mara, she questioned their ability to become friends. After all, her three closest companions had recently moved far away, and she wondered whether it was possible to start over again with yet another stranger. Sorenson told Mara to take her time, to not jump into a relationship that could become complicated. With the caution acquired through painful experience, Sorenson wanted to make sure this association would be beneficial to them both.

Their first meeting was much like a blind date, arranged by outsiders. Each had read the other’s self-descriptive fact sheet and had agreed they had some things in common. An appointment was set; introductions were made. They talked for a while, evaluating each other with unspoken thoughts. They recognized their differences.

Mara was outgoing and self-contained, the kind of person who gravitates naturally toward friends and acquaintances. She has rarely felt lonely and always finds a way to stay happy. Sorenson, on the other hand, has known severe depression, the kind that incapacitates a person and leaves her stranded and very much alone. She was recently discharged from a residential mental health program, her depression under control. She needed a friend, someone who could help her adapt to her independence. Mara, the more impulsive of the two, was ready to set another date. Sorenson held back.

“She told me to go home and think about it,” Mara recalled. “But I knew I liked her. She is a very neat person, and really coquettish. I like people like that.”

She called Sorenson and arranged to meet on a Friday at noon. They’ve gotten together every Friday since for an hour of conversation and camaraderie. They talk about fashion, a common passion, and books. They go for walks in Balboa Park, or eat lunch at an outdoor cafe. Gradually, Sorenson became convinced that she had met someone with the three characteristics most important to her in a friend--honesty, dependability and trustworthiness. They had become Compeer friends.

Finding a Way

Compeer is a national program designed to provide friendship and companionship for people coping with mental illness. Some are hospitalized or have been recently discharged. Some have a mental illness but have never been institutionalized. They share a sense of isolation, a feeling of being lost in the world. They may be on medication and be receiving therapy, but for the most part they are alone.

“Compeer offers them the simple premise of friendship in the complex field of mental health,” said Bernice Skirboll, executive director of Compeer’s national offices in Rochester, N.Y. Skirboll was in San Diego recently to attend a California Alliance for the Mentally Ill conference. She spent the first morning of the conference in a small room at the Episcopal Community Services building in Hillcrest, meeting the volunteers who are organizing the local Compeer program, one of eight in California.

She spoke of her pleasure and pride in the development of Compeer, a program that began 10 years ago when she took over the “Adopt-a-Friend” program designed to find volunteer friends for mentally ill patients at Rochester Psychiatric Hospital. The program changed as Skirboll watched the process of deinstitutionalization occur, turning many patients out into a community unable to provide them adequate services and support.

“It is widely recognized and accepted that there are more people living in the community who are quote ‘mentally ill’ and have been receiving treatment than at any other time in our history,” Skirboll said, explaining the effects of the national move to decrease the population in public psychiatric hospitals.

“There has been a dramatic change in philosophy with the idea that people should be able to live productive lives in the least restrictive environment possible. But there were a lot of gaps and holes in the community care system developed to deal with this change.

“It’s one thing to be diagnosed well enough to leave the hospital, but it’s another thing to be able to deal with the real world.

“I looked at all those patients who came back to the hospital because it was the only place they felt they were safe, the only place where they knew they would be taken care of and have a roof over their heads. I felt there had to be help out there for that person. Compeer serves as an adjunct to therapy to fill the gap or void between where the clinical services are provided and where there are no adequate or appropriate support systems.”

Powerful Medicine

As Skirboll developed her program, she searched for a new title and found the word compeer in a dictionary. She liked the definition: “A person of equal status or rank; a comrade, companion or associate.” The word summed up her concept, and as she researched the title for the patenting process, she found she was not the first to realize the worth of this word.

“Compeer was used in the U.S. for two patents in the early 1900s, for snuff and alcohol,” Skirboll said, still amused with her discovery. “The (patent) that’s still active said, ‘Make Compeer your best friend.’ It just shows they knew friendship was powerful medicine even way back then.”

With a budget of $3,500 in donations from 17 foundations, Skirboll began attracting volunteers and referrals. Ten years later, Compeer has a budget of $500,000, including a state grant to develop a new program for the families of the mentally ill. In 1982 and 1983, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) granted Compeer $153,000 to begin branch programs around the country. There are now 50 such programs, and 26 more are in the developmental stages.

“Compeer exists in Alaska, the Virgin Islands, Montreal and Australia,” Skirboll said. “When you’re hurting, it makes no difference where you live. The feelings are the same.”

Making a Match

The San Diego chapter of Compeer is just beginning to take hold and gain support, under the supervision of volunteer Jeanette Keil. Following the Rochester model, Keil solicits volunteers, offering them training, supervision and support as they learn to be Compeer friends. Keil has arranged 18 matches in the two months since the chapter began, including the friendship between Sorenson and Mara.

“We really promote the idea of equal and peer, the fact that we are all human beings,” Keil said of the volunteer training and subsequent matches. “There is a very strong part of all of us that needs to relate to other people. We’ve discovered that some people who have never gone through a struggle with a friendship have been able to go through struggles with their Compeer friends. In other friendships, when an issue has come up, these people have backed away from each other either because they didn’t have the social skills for making friends or because they were afraid. With the Compeer program, there is a commitment to work through those things. To have this kind of energy and growth is exciting for everyone involved.”

Finding Funding

To keep the program alive, Keil and other program supporters from the San Diego Alliances for the Mentally Ill continue searching for funding to staff the program and solicit volunteers. Skirboll sympathized with the local volunteers, predicting that they would eventually find donors and support from the United Way, which turned the Rochester program down three years in a row. Compeer is now the agency the Rochester United Way highlights in its fund-raising efforts, and corporations such as Kodak, Xerox and General Motors are regular contributors.

“Compeer is an idea whose time has come,” Skirboll said. “When NIMH chose to give us our grants, they said the program met a problem of national concern over the movement of the mentally ill into the community during the historic period of deinstitutionalization.

“Compeer is so simple. We’ve taken the basic premise of friendship and developed a sophisticatedly organized and administered program. That’s why NIMH decided to put us on the map.

“It comes down to dollars and cents. In Rochester, it costs $55,000 a year to keep someone in an institution. If we keep one person out of the hospital, that covers our budget. It’s not only a personally redeeming, humanizing kind of program, it’s also a dollar-saving program. Compeer maximizes public dollars by matching them with our greatest national resource--people.”

Sorenson and Mara are evidence of the great benefits that can be derived from such a simple thing as friendship. Both now have someone who is interested and cares about them. They look forward to their Friday lunch hours, where Mara dependably fulfills her Compeer commitment to spend one hour a week for one year with Sorenson. It’s a promise she enjoys, saying she realizes how much friendship can mean to someone who is alone.

“When I read about the program, I thought I would like to be a friend,” she said simply. “I have known people who have suffered greatly just because they have no friends.”