Climbing OUR Mt. Everest

12 November 2014 was the hardest day of my professional law enforcement career.

Several weeks earlier, I had sent a memorandum to the chief of police.  In it, I explained the need for us, as an agency and as a law enforcement community, to do more for our own when it came to mental wellness.  I use the term wellness instead of health because, well, because mental health sounds bad, taboo, to cops and wellness, which is usually used in the same context as fitness, is a more appropriate word anyway.  I timed the memo to coincide with a tragic call for service that my teammates responded to and will probably never forget.

A former county canine deputy sheriff and her husband, a law enforcement officer from a neighboring county, lived in the city, literally like a few blocks from the police station.  Sadly, we had responded to numerous calls for service at their residence before throughout the years.  Almost exclusively domestics.  And alcohol was regularly involved.  Although it's mainly speculation, I would venture to say that much of their mutual issues arose from the pressures, stresses, and traumas of the jobs they both endured.  Add a terminal illness to the canine deputy and you can have a very unstable person and situation.  So, when the call came in for a suicide that just occurred, it wasn't totally a surprise.  Still, it was horribly tragic.  I was off.  Not working.  But my team was and responded, the initial on scene officers.  Talking to them the next day and the days after, they said it wasn't pretty, hard to maintain focus.  But we talked, individually and collectively.  It was harder for a few of them as they knew the deputy personally.

But there was my window.  It was my opportunity to take that first step in trying to overcome the greatest stigma in the law enforcement community: mental health.  Over the course of a few months prior to that incident, I had disseminated a mental wellness questionnaire to gauge where our department officers had issues regarding mental wellness.  I had gotten the idea from a study I read by Dr. Ellen Marshall who wrote about Cumulative Career Traumatic Stress, or CCTS, as she labeled it.  CCTS is similar to PTSD in its symptoms and subsequent effects on the individual.  It's simply the cumulative effect of many traumatic events over the years versus PTSD, which is the result of a singular event.

The surveys were anonymous and voluntary.  I got just under a 35% return rate.  Not stellar, but not too bad considering most police officers are petrified to discuss or even elude to anything mental.  Still, the results were astonishing and heartbreaking.  Here are a few...

• 70% have flashbacks of an incident
• 80% have difficulty concentrating
• 80% have trouble sleeping (falling asleep or staying asleep)
• 70% have experienced a change in appetite 
• 42% have experienced intense fear, helplessness, or horror
• 70% say that stress from the job affects personal relationships 
• 75% use alcohol to relax

And my two biggies...

• 25% have thought about suicide 
• Another 25% think that a line of duty death is better than suicide

Law enforcement posttraumatic stress and depression experts that I have conferred and shared the survey results with all agree...these numbers are conservative, underreported.  And very scary.

I felt, however, that in order for anything to start rolling or any progress to be made that this venture, this challenge, had to be personalized.  So, I personalized it.  I bared my soul to the members of my department's command staff...from my initial major traumatic incident in 2001, to the subsequent and compounding trauma and stress, to the toll it took on me and my personal life, to the collapse of my marriage, to therapy, meds, and, yes, to suicidal ideations all before talking about how I had overcome those demons by working hard and being proactive in my healing.  This was not about self promotion or propping myself up.  Not even close.  It was all about my brothers and sisters-in-arms who suffer silently, everyday, too afraid to reach out because of this oppressive stigma in the police culture about mental wellness or mental anything.  It was about the guy next to me and getting shit started and done for him.  I wanted to tell them, through my story, that, no, PTSD or depression or anxiety for a  police officer is NOT a career death sentence.

So, the climb has begun...I'm at the base camp of law enforcement's Mt. Everest.  Staring up, but not undaunted.  I may have just one or two other committed professionals with me at the start...but we'll pick up more as we ascend, climb, and eventually conquer this horrible stigma that is killing...literally...killing police officers across this country, and the world.

In 2012, ODMP reported 125 officers killed in the line of duty.  In that same year, Badge of Life, a police suicide prevention organization, surveyed the internet for media and police reports and found 126 police suicides.   Out of the 125 LODDs, 48 were by felonious gunfire.  That means between 2-3 times as many cops are taking their own lives by their own hands than are being killed by another.  NLEOMF reports a LODD occurs once every 53 hours...according to the IACP, a police suicide happens once every 17-18 hours.

We need to help our brothers and sisters.  Look out for one another...what you say could save a life of someone in blue.