Editor’s Note: Help is available if you or someone you know has a mental illness or is struggling emotionally. If you are suicidal or in emotional distress, please call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline.
Finally, after years of avoidance, dismissal, fear of job loss and navigation through a pandemic mental healthcare has become the hot topic among first responders. After years of burnout, compassion fatigue, career changes and suicides there has been the realization that mental healthcare is just as important as physical healthcare. You see, if you do not have good mental health, it will adversely affect your physical and if you do not have good physical health, it will adversely affect your mental health.
It is all our health, and we need to start treating the whole being. Health can be broken down into multiple categories, physical health, mental health, spiritual health, social health and so on, but we must realize that the common denominator is our health, and all these categories are interdependent upon each other. What affects one affects all.
A Taboo Topic?
The word stigma has been used for decades surrounding the topic of mental health. It implies mental health and mental healthcare is a negative taboo topic that is better off avoided and not recognized. The problem with this thought process is that if mental health is not addressed and proactively protected, we end up with responders who spiral down the rabbit hole of anxiety, depression, stress, cumulative stress, post-traumatic stress disorder, job or career loss, divorce and at times death.
Death can be a result of suicide, deteriorated physical health due to the unresolved anxiety, depression, and stress, or because of substance use to self-medicate and hide the signs and symptoms.
The results of not addressing the mental health of first responders have been catastrophic with responder death the ultimate preventable outcome. How can this be preventable? How have we let this historic attitude of suck it up and move on mentality continue for so long? How many lives could have been saved? We cannot change the past, but we are in control of the now and the future.
It is time for major attitude shifts and implementation of best practices to educate and proactively support our responders and their families. Stigma is crushed through recognition, education and action.
Recognizing Mental Health
First, there must be recognition of the facts. The facts are first responders are exposed to repeated traumatic events during their career and reactions involving anxiety, depression and stress are normal reactions to these abnormal events. If a responder is not taught to recognize and accept the signs and symptoms they are experiencing and know that help is available and encouraged, they will begin their journey down that rabbit hole previously mentioned.
If they do not know positive coping strategies and do not have strong family, social and or work support systems in place, that journey will be swift and life altering. Administrations have treated responders negatively and punitively for seeking mental healthcare and have facilitated the negative coping strategies of substance use and mental health deterioration leading to job loss and failure.
Second, there must be education. Evidence based mental health education programs like Mental Health First Aid by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing should be implemented into responder training early on. This training teaches responders, administrators, and families the signs and symptoms to look for in someone experiencing a mental health challenge or crisis and gives them the tools to intervene and guide individuals to the care needed.
It also teaches positive coping skills and how to build strong peer support systems that proactively recognize when a traumatic event has occurred, and peer follow-up should be the standard. Not every person experience or reacts to trauma in the same way so a standardized approach covers all the bases.
Finally, action must be taken by administrators to implement mental health services that are in no way punitive or reflect negatively on the responders who utilize the services. Yearly mental health check-ups should be as common as a yearly physical check-up. Education, such as mental health first aid, should be mandatory for all responders and administrators and should be prioritized for all new responders entering the field.
Support
Peer support should be a priority and proactive support after traumatic events should be the standard. Utilization of Critical Incident Stress Management response teams for follow-up and debriefing should also be the standard after traumatic events of certain degrees.
By recognizing, educating, and implementing actions to support the mental health of first responders, the word stigma will disappear. The overall health of first responders will be improved thus decreasing the incidence of burnout, compassion fatigue, cumulative stress, and post-traumatic stress disorder. But the greatest improvement of all will be the lives saved from pre-mature death and suicide.
