"If I Can Help Somebody" | Introducing Dee Hinton-Turner

“Glory!” is one of the first words you’re likely to hear Dorthene “Dee” Hinton-Turner say. It’s not just an expression but a way Dee sees the world. Dee is inspired with a sense of mission and purpose. It’s this that drives her to help others, first as a Certified Peer Specialist, and now as a Peer Educator training CPSs at CCSR.

But Dee’s desire to help is not new; it goes back to her childhood, to singing Mahalia Jackson’s classic “If I Can Help Somebody” in church:  

If I can help somebody
As I travel along
If I can help somebody
With a word or song
If I can help somebody
From doing wrong
My living shall not be in vain.

Dee was not sure what shape that help would take until she began a relationship with Southwest Boulevard Family Healthcare in Kansas City, Kansas. Here, Dee discovered the power of peer support in her own life, and knew that, as she says “This is it!” The spirit had led her on a path to become a CPS and help others as she had been helped.

Dee set her professional sights on two targets, Rainbow Mental Health Center or KU Medical Center in Kansas City, persisting in her attempts to land a job as a CPS at these organizations. When she finally got in at Rainbow, “Oh my goodness!” she found the healing power of helping others works both ways: “Being a CPS is personal medicine for me,” according to Dee. “There wasn’t a lot of leadership or instruction” at Rainbow, she notes, so Dee could use her peers’ own needs to help empower them. This in turn helped foster in Dee a sense of her own independence and personal power. At the end of a day at Rainbow, Dee was “thoroughly exhausted,” but felt rewarded and fulfilled.

In the words of “If I Can Help Somebody,” 

My living shall not be in vain
My living shall not be in vain
If I can help somebody
While I'm singing this song
My living shall not be in vain.

Dee’s experiences as a CPS were not in vain. Some days, she went into work “uncertain if a discussion topic [she selected] would work,” but when it did, the negative self-talk common to psychiatric diagnosis dissolved, uplifting both the peer seeking services and peer support worker alike. In small, profound ways, her work was made up of many acts of faith.

That faith’s solid foundation and the role of spirituality in her life make Dee think of herself as “The Spiritual CPS,” and her goals as a Peer Educator include exploring the relationship between spirituality and recovery from psychiatric diagnosis. “My being at WSU is not by chance,” she says, but an opportunity to learn and develop even more helping skills, part of her vision to “strike out and know more.”

And in that there is the glory of empowering others to live lives that are not in vain.    

For more about becoming a Certified Peer Specialist, visit trainingteams.org.