The
years pass and you become numb to the blood, the brains, the dead babies, the teenagers impaled on the steering wheels, the
8 month old baby that was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, the old lady who had no one and died alone only to be discovered
a week later in a state of decay. You talk about it with your fellow officers
and use gallows humor – there are lots of jokes. You have to be tough;
you can’t let on that you are sickened by what you have seen, that you have flashbacks, nightmares, and insomnia about
being called to that apartment house because what the landlord thought was a stuffed up toilet turned out to be a newborn
that was flushed down in an attempt to hide the pregnancy. Your world is chaotic,
yet you can’t go home and tell your wife because you have to protect her from what you have seen. She wouldn’t understand this bizarre world you live in, where what you next see might be even worse
than what you saw last. The attacks on all of your senses – your vision,
smells, hearing are all near shut down to prevent you from taking anymore. So
you keep it inside. This is a significant part in the world of a police officer
– the part that you just can’t even imagine.
Some officers feel shame
because what they have endured overtakes them (“I’m not supposed to have feelings – I’m a cop”). All the training, the exposure, the psychological armor they are supposed to have
fails them and they become profoundly depressed. Their world view has been ruptured. They have lost the ability to do their jobs effectively; their family relationships
are fraught with tension and conflict and life, which used to have meaning, seems to be at a literal dead end. Even alcohol doesn’t help. Their inner pain is so great
– their loss of touch with everything and everyone that brought them feelings of security, satisfaction, and belonging,
is buried under mounds of desperation and hurt. Losing coping skills by the minute,
feeling like they have failed beyond failure, and unable to ask for help from brother officers and too embarrassed to get
professional help, they decide that suicide is the solution. It’s not the
access to guns that makes it more likely, despite what some think. Years ago
these officers would get drunk and deliberately drive their cars into fatal accidents.
I’ve heard it say, too tritely I might add, that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but
the saying is too gimmicky and not genuine – because it’s said mostly by administrative personnel within police
departments who are quick to dispatch the now dead-by-suicide officer’s case to a file cabinet marked “closed.”
Line-of-Duty Suicides (LODS)
are, to be sure, a topic of controversy within the law enforcement community. The
very idea that the job might cause an officer to commit suicide is unfathomable. Why
then, is the suicide rate among active-duty police officers so high? Why is the
suicide rate of retired police officers higher? What factors account for negative
views held by police officers against their brother and sister officers who are LODS?
Part of the explanation
is, of course, how people cope with this event – how they think about it, chew it up, digest it, and bring it to a conclusion
so that it can make sense to them. But often it doesn’t. Instead of trying to understand, police officers (and their superiors) mostly denigrate LODS and seem to
expend much effort in distancing themselves from the LODS. In this regard, awful,
terrible remarks are made, and labels are applied: “coward, chicken, baby,
pussy, whiner, ‘didn’t have what it takes,’ etc.” Their
unconscious psychological defenses are now activated in a search for negative reasons why the LODS occurred –
all in an effort to make sense of what has occurred. Unable to deal with their
real feelings of sadness and anxiety due to a culture that is intolerant of acute stress and its prevention, surviving
officers use denial and avoidance in order to distance themselves from their LODS colleague, and suppress talking about it
or why it occurred. In that regard, the defense of displacement is used, as they
place responsibility for the LODS onto others, such as family members whom they blame for financial and marital difficulties. These rationalizations serve to protect and distance surviving officers from identifying
too strongly with the LODS, and result in warding off empathy and compassion for the officer as well as his wife, children,
and extended family members. Behind all of this lay institutional defenses, wherein
policies strongly prohibit honoring LODS as Line of Duty Deaths (LODD), and promote a non-response and a silence of shame
of the officer’s actions.
What do we do? How do we respond to the growing number of LODS? The answer
is the typical one: education, education, education. For years I have called for teaching stress reduction and psychological coping in police academies. Stress reduction, by the way, is not by any means a new concept in law enforcement. Few people know that stress management from involvement in critical incidents has
long been a part of the training of agents in the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Get
to officers when they are young – and make stress and coping techniques and resources are part of their training and
culture – and they will use them just like one of the tools on their gun belts.
Include exposure to debriefings; at the end of the work week, have those officers come together in groups of six-to
eight to discuss the hot incidents of the week. This is an important intervention;
it requires a licensed mental health person trained in police culture and Critical Incident Stress Management (CISM) to work
with and understand the defusing and debriefing process utilized with police officers.
Make these end-of-tour groups mandatory, so that talking about stressful, horrific events becomes the norm and allows
officers to process the incidents in an appropriate psychological way. Adopt
the “what is said in here, stays in here” rule of confidentiality, and keep no records of what goes on in groups. As routine, groups that meet weekly for two hours becomes a regular part of the job,
LODS will likely be reduced, and sick days will decrease as well as stress-related health problems such as heart disease,
ulcers, and other conditions brought on by high levels of stress. Under these
conditions, everyone wins: the officer, the department, families, as well as
the public.
So ask yourself – what will it take to effect change? In
addition to early training, let’s also start with honoring those LODS. Their
names need to be put on the walls of those who have been lost via LODD. In this
way, police culture is permanently shifted to one of caring and forgiveness – brother and sister officers no longer
have to suffer in silence at the loss of a friend, a brother, or sister; families feel honored and can be proud of the work
that was done and the fact that this act doesn’t have to negate the officer - or the fine work he or she did while on
the job. We need further research on LODS in psychological journals and, more
practically, in publications read by police chiefs and police associations with wide audiences. We need surviving families to start grassroots campaigns aimed
at their legislators to educate them as to LODS and promote legislation for mental health critical care of police officers
and their families.
--
Dr. Richard L. Levenson,
Jr. is a New York State Licensed Psychologist with a clinical practice in Manhattan. He is a specialist in treating police officers and their families. Dr. Levenson is a Consulting Psychologist to the Badge of Life Foundation, and is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Emergency Mental Health as well as the Journal of Traumatology. Dr. Levenson is Department Police Surgeon for the Ulster County Sheriff’s Office
in Kingston, NY. He is also a member of the Board
of Directors of the 9/11 Police Aid Foundation, a not-for-profit organization. The Foundation was incorporated to provide
charitable relief to any member, (retired or active), of any Police Department that has become ill or disabled in any way
due to the effects of the terrorist attacks against this country on 9/11/01. The
Foundation also provides aid and support to surviving family members of any officer that should succumb to such an illness
or injury. Email to: drlevenson@gmail.com
.Article from Badge of Life.com
