I’ve learned a lot about what it’s like to be a police officer from my sister, who has been an officer for a few years now. My sister and I are close and while I’m proud of the profession she has chosen, in the back of my mind I do worry about her safety. We have had a number of conversations about the recent police shootings and violence across the country, and based on these I feel there is a major component of this discussion that many people are missing when talking about police brutality– the mental health of the police officers.
Most people are familiar with traditional Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which is when a person is traumatized by a major event like rape, war, a natural disaster, etc. The person becomes hypervigilant, can have nightmares or flashbacks, increased anxiety, and can be overcome with intense fear when triggered by something that reminds them of the traumatizing event.
There is another kind of PTSD called complex PTSD. This lesser known condition is essentially chronic PTSD that is due to ongoing severe stress. Sufferers have the same symptoms, but symptoms might appear to look milder and the person might be able to function better on a day to day basis since the trauma is happening over an extended period of time. A good example of this is domestic spousal violence.
One thing that I believe society tends to overlook is that many of these police officers may fall into this category as well. My sister always has day to day stories about being called out to find decomposed dead bodies in homes, seeing brains on the wall from suicides, or dealing with chronically mentally ill people on the street. I cannot wrap my head around how police officers do this day in and out. People are generally not surprised, or even expect, war veterans to come back from combat with PTSD – why is it different when it comes to police officers?
Think about how you would react if two hours before dinner with your wife and kids, you just dealt with a crime scene where you had to look straight in the face of someone that just blew their brains out. Or you just finished a call where you chased an armed and dangerous individual into an abandoned building, tackled him to the ground, and then had to go pick your kids up from soccer practice. Can you do that without being shaken to your core? With all my trauma and mental health training I am not sure I could handle it.
I know there are stereotypes about officers frequenting 7-11 for their daily coffee and doughnuts because they have a lot of down time, and it may be true to some degree, but it actually may be another cause for further mental health issues. The extreme lows followed by extreme highs (such as going out on emergency calls) can be very hard on their psyche. This consistent up and down is very unnatural and can wreak havoc on their bodies – another issue we forget when we think about our officers.
Of course, none of this justifies the violence towards innocent citizens or racism that we have seen in a number of recent incidents (and there are certainly many more we don’t see). It isn’t acceptable, definitely should not be tolerated, and these officers should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law for abusing the public’s trust in them. But I think that there is something that can be done to help lower the frequency of these incidents – mandatory mental health counseling for all police officers.
There certainly will be push-back from officers and their departments as they tend not to be fans of mental health initiatives because of the stigma attached to it. I have heard from officers that if they were interested in mental health counseling that it would be fine, but never to share it with fellow officers. Maybe it has to do with their image of “police machismo” or the idea that only weak people need help, regardless, it isn’t healthy and this culture needs to change.
Mandatory wellness counseling is absolutely critical as it will reach everyone that needs it and will help remove the stigma attached to it. Of course there will be officers that have to go to counseling and don’t need it, but this will be far outweighed by the many more that do need counseling and never would do it unless it was forced upon them.
What would be the result of this initiative? If we can take care of the mental health stress that many of these officers face, then they will be in a much better state of mind when dealing with their day-to-day calls. While there are certainly some racist and morally depraved officers who would conduct themselves in a despicable fashion regardless, there are a lot of officers who are good and fair people who could snap because of how their jobs have affected them. If and when this happens the consequences for them and society are much greater than most other professions.
It is about time we address this important issue for our police officers, and if we do then I think we will see more mentally well-balanced officers and many less occurrences of unnecessary police brutality. We owe it to our officers and to our society as a whole.