GUILDERLAND — W. Brian Barr of Guilderland, a social worker, has spent a lifetime helping addicts and people with mental illness.

He was recognized for that work on Sept. 14 with a lifetime achievement award during the 27th annual Treatment and Recovery Works March, organized by Albany County Substance Abuse and Prevention Providers and the Albany County STOP-DWI program.

The march in Albany brings together treatment providers, prevention providers, schools, county leaders, law enforcement, and the community every year to draw attention to the idea that drug and alcohol treatment improves lives.

Barr is currently the board president of Senior Hope Counseling, an organization that works with people aged 50 and over who have a problem with alcohol or drugs.

“I think we’re the only organization in the Northeast that is working with this population, to help them on an outpatient basis,” Barr said, calling this population one that “has been neglected.”

Barr was nominated by Dr. Nicole S. MacFarland, who is the executive director of Senior Hope, and the award was presented by Dr. Alice Green.

According to MacFarland’s nomination, Barr’s long career also includes serving on the board of The Next Step, a program for women seeking recovery from substance-abuse; acting as president of the Neighborhood Resource Center, which addresses issues of substance abuse in local neighborhoods; serving as president of a youth program that offers evening recreation and art programs to children in a high-risk community; serving as president of the Family and Children’s Service Agency of Albany; and acting for years as a clinical and community director for the LaSalle School in Albany and also as Associate Commissioner for the State Office of Children and Family Services.

As MacFarland noted in her nomination, Barr has worked “tirelessly” in the area of suicide prevention since his own son, Kenneth, killed himself in 1984, at the age of 18.

Barr said this week, of his lifetime achievement award, that he is very fortunate to be publicly honored, but that there are many unsung heroes working with this same population, including secretaries, drivers, and others who work day in and day out in a tough field but don’t have opportunity, the way social workers do, to see “the glint in the eyes of the person who is just starting to turn their life around.”

He urged the mental-health professionals and public officials at the ceremony to remember to take a moment to thank, for their efforts, the many people behind the scenes who “keep this going.”