HEALTH CARE

Somers Opens Clinic: Suzanne Somers may best be remembered for her roles in television comedies “Three’s Company,” “She’s the Sheriff” and “Step By Step.” Her newest venture, however, is the culmination of a second career she has been developing as a spokeswoman for children of alcoholics and troubled families.

Banking that her name recognition will help her succeed in a highly competitive psychiatric care marketplace, Somers has opened the Suzanne Somers Family Center, an outpatient psychiatric clinic, in Orange--the first of what could eventually become a national network of such clinics.

The clinic, of which she is a director, will focus on helping families overcome behavior disorders and the effects of drug and alcohol addictions.

“We hope to make a difference in combatting the effects of addictions on families and have an active presence in the community,” said Gerald Myers, chief executive of the clinic’s management company, the Suzanne Somers Institute, based in Palm Springs.

Somers, who was raised in an alcoholic family and chronicled her life in a 1988 autobiography, “Keeping Secrets,” has become an outspoken advocate of life after alcoholism.

At the Orange clinic, open for two weeks, families and patients are subjected to intensive counseling and therapy under what it calls the “family systems approach.”

“There is an enormous amount of work to be done to increase public awareness of the effects addictions have on families,” Somers said in a prepared statement. “We want to reach children and adults with information that can help them before any more damage is done to their lives.”