Last year, the FBI reported that 138 law enforcement officers had died by suicide, about ten more than the number of officers killed in the line of duty. And a recent report from the Ruderman Family Foundation hypothesizes that stigma has led to those suicides being undercounted.
Dr. Jennifer Prohaska, a psychologist and owner of Insight Public Safety and Forensic Consulting, told KMOX that alongside more resources to help officers struggling with mental illness, prevention is key.
"On the front end, I think it's actually more important that we start to work on preventing these issues so that they actually don't need inpatient care that's really disruptive to people's lives," she said. "So we probably need to do more on the front end. But obviously, residential facilities are very much needed, the waitlists are very long."
She said that issues like alcoholism are disproportionately prevalent in first responders, with 10% of the American population dealing with alcohol problems. They affect 20-30% of first responders.
"Actually there's higher rates of binge drinking among firefighters in particular," she said. "And so I think as the alcohol rates are probably staying about the same, I think it is popping to the surface more because they're drinking in settings that are more likely to get them noticed and cause other issues."
She also said that mental illnesses are rising generally across the country, with spikes in anxiety, depression and trauma-related symptoms. She added that first responders are some of the most difficult people to treat.
"They need high, high, high quality resources, even on an individual psychotherapy basis. Because if you think about the trauma that they're experiencing, it's very active," she said. "It's still ongoing, most of the people we treated our clinic are actually still working. So they're facing trauma day in and day out repetitive trauma, and they're going back into the same environments that cause trauma."
She said what makes first responders hard to treat is struggling to get them to express their thoughts and feelings because they're in a profession where they're always trying to solve other people's problems.
"When you're first responder, you go out the next day and experience the same thing. So it's really hard to relax enough even to start working on it."
Hear more about the state of first-responder mental health and treatment from Total Information AM:
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