Burnouts among police officers
In Module 6, we’ve been presented an article, Routine work Environment Stress and PTSD Symptoms in Police Officers, that discussed the relationship between work environment and PTSD symptoms among police officers. The results showed that their work environment stress was most strongly associated with their PTSD symptoms and more specifically, variables such as gender and ethnicity resulted in having more negative social interaction and discrimination (Meguen et al., 2009). We further discussed the stigma surrounding police officers with mental illnesses and their concerns regards to requesting treatment due to fear of losing their jobs, having their license to carry a firearm taken away, being reassigned to a less stressful position, or being ridiculed by their peers and being seen as weak. While offering all the necessary resources to help better their mental health is crucial, being able to recognize the underlying cause to their problems is also important. Behind every police officer is a husband, a wife, a father, a mother, a friend, a coworker, and most importantly a human being. These qualities are often overlooked because of their heroic actions in the community, and places so much pressure on them to be the “hero.” What we don’t see is the emotional and physical exhaustion from responding to countless calls where they are expected to make split second decisions under pressure.
Most police officers, male and female, reported that the most frequent stressor was responding to violent family disputes, and the most highly rated stressor was being exposed to battered children. Though infrequent, another most highly rated stressors were killing someone in the line of duty and experiencing a fellow officer being killed. Male officers reported court appearances off duty and working second jobs as stressors while female officers reported experiencing lack of support from supervisors as a stressor (Violanti et al., 2016).
Reducing the amount of incidents that act as stressors may be impossible, but reducing the amount of time and workload police officers is exposed to stressful situations is more practical. Offering debriefings like CISM and overall organizational support is important for officers as it would help them deal with traumatic events that unfortunately comes with the occupation. On the other hand, reports of female officers feeling under-supported by their superiors reiterates how even though we are seeing an increase in female officers across police departments, some organizations are still having issues of discrimination. For that reason, there needs to be more training and education providing statistics and evidence on the positive aspects of women in policing. Overall, without addressing these stressors, more police officers will experience burnouts and significant mental health deterioration leading to depression and suicide.
Maguen, Metzler, T. J., McCaslin, S. E., Inslicht, S. S., Henn-Haase, C., Neylan, T. C., & Marmar, C. R. (2009). Routine Work Environment Stress and PTSD Symptoms in Police Officers. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 197(10), 754–760. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0b013e3181b975f8
Violanti, Fekedulegn, D., Hartley, T. A., Charles, L. E., Andrew, M. E., Ma, C. C., & Burchfiel, C. M. (2016). Highly Rated and most Frequent Stressors among Police Officers: Gender Differences. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 41(4), 645–662. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-016-9342-x