🌅 Meet Sunrise Counseling Center: 33 Years of Never Turning Anyone Away

🏃‍♀️ Race of Hope Returns to Southampton to Fight Depression

🚨 Suffolk Police Warn of a Gold Bar Scam Targeting Seniors

🎈 Merrick's Balloon Mission Launches an Islandwide Cleanup Campaign

Picture calling a therapist in the 1980s, before the internet existed, and being told the waiting list is full. That was Richard Scheinberg's problem almost 40 years ago, and it's the reason Sunrise Counseling Center exists today.

Richard Scheinberg earned his graduate degree in social work in 1981 and opened a private practice right away. Word of mouth built his caseload fast, fast enough that he had to start turning people away, and the only advice he could give them back then was to check the yellow pages to find other therapists, because that was genuinely all there was. At the same time, colleagues kept asking him how he'd figured out the business side of private practice, the phones, the billing, the marketing, pieces most good clinicians never learn. By 1993, with a waiting list of his own and friends who needed exactly what he'd already built, Richard opened Sunrise Counseling Center. This year marks the practice's 33rd anniversary.

What started in a three room suite on Sunrise Highway grew into nine rooms, then Richard bought his own building in East Islip, and eventually operated four physical locations before COVID. When the pandemic hit and in person visits became impossible, Richard pushed hard, including calling politicians directly, to get telehealth mandated at the same insurance reimbursement rates as in person care, warning that cutting thousands of patients off abruptly from medication and therapy would overwhelm emergency rooms. The push worked, and it let Sunrise consolidate down to two full locations in East Islip and Bay Shore while still seeing about half its patients virtually. Today the practice employs 50 therapists and five medication providers, who see over 3,000 people a month. The practice is still solely owned by Richard himself, who has turned down repeated offers to sell or bring on corporate partners over the years.

Sunrise also runs one of the most selective clinical training programs on Long Island, pulling from around a hundred graduate school applications a year and accepting only the top 5%, which means many of Sunrise's interns already carry years of real world experience, from retired school district administrators to specialists in human trafficking screening, before they ever sit down with a client. The practice also offers a trauma protocol called RTM (thertmprotocol.com), reconsolidation of traumatic memories, that Richard says resolves trauma in three or four sessions with a 92% success rate in cases the field normally expects to take years, including a client this year who carried trauma from 9/11 for 26 years.

If cost has ever kept you from getting help, Sunrise works to find a way around it. For patients without coverage that fits, sliding scale sessions run as low as $45 to $60, which Richard points out is less than a family dinner out.

If you or someone you know needs therapy or medication management, in person or virtually, in English, Spanish, Ukrainian, or Haitian Creole, reach out to Sunrise Counseling Center at https://www.sunrisecounselingcenter.com/.

Richard is 73 and still sees his own patients directly. Forty five years in, and the man who once had nothing to offer callers but the yellow pages has built one of the largest private practices on Long Island, proof that the whole thing was never about the size of the operation, it was about making sure nobody got told to wait at their greatest time of need.

Sunday morning, Lake Agawam in Southampton Village will be ringed with sneakers instead of picnic blankets. The Hope for Depression Research Foundation is holding its 11th annual Race of Hope, a 5K that also happens to mark HDRF's 20th anniversary as an organization. Registration opens at 6:30 a.m. and the race starts at 8:30, with the scenic loop around the lake drawing everyone from serious runners to families pushing strollers.

The race exists to fund brain research into depression and the mood disorders that ride along with it, including bipolar disorder, postpartum depression, PTSD, anxiety and suicide risk. Last year's race brought out 1,100 participants and raised more than $500,000 for that research, and the series has generated over $5 million since it started on the East End in 2016 before expanding to Palm Beach and New York City.

Whether you're there to run, walk, or just cheer from the sidewalk, it's a morning built around a cause that touches nearly every family on Long Island in one way or another. Registration is still open if you want to lace up last minute.

👉 Read more: LongIsland.com

If someone calls claiming your bank account has been compromised and the only fix is to buy gold bars and hand them over for safekeeping, hang up. Suffolk County officials say more than a dozen seniors have been targeted by this scheme in recent weeks, with scammers posing as government agencies, banks, or computer tech support to scare victims into acting fast.

Detectives recently stopped one case just in time. An elderly woman in Hauppauge responded to a pop up warning on her computer, convinced her accounts had been hacked, and was moments away from handing over $140,000 in gold before police intervened. Investigators later discovered the scammers were listening in through her own computer the entire time.

With gold prices near record highs, county legislators are now pushing a law that would require precious metal dealers to post visible warning signs about the scam. In the meantime, the best defense is the oldest one: if a stranger on the phone is telling you to rush out and buy gold, it's not your bank calling.

👉 Read more: Patch

A new push to make community cleanups easier to join is spreading across Long Island, and it started with one Merrick woman's frustration over discarded balloons. Cynthia Seibold founded Balloon Mission in 2023 after repeatedly finding balloons littering local beaches and parks, and it's since grown into the nation's first nonprofit dedicated entirely to balloon collection and recycling.

Now Seibold is helping lead something bigger: Keep Long Island Beautiful, a coalition campaign launched July 1 alongside the Long Island Children's Museum's America's 250th birthday celebration. The effort brings together Balloon Mission, Reworld, Save the Great South Bay and the Long Island South Shore Waterkeeper, all working to make it simpler for residents to organize or join cleanups of neighborhoods, parks and waterways.

Balloon Mission itself has expanded to partnerships with more than 70 organizations across eight states since it started, but its roots are still very much local. If you've ever wanted to do something with your Saturday morning besides scroll your phone, this is a good excuse.

👉 Read more: LI Herald

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