‘You are not alone:’ Union leader’s tearful plea on officer suicides

TORONTO — Three officer suicides in as many weeks have prompted a police union leader to write a deeply personal letter urging his members to reach out if they find themselves in emotional distress.

The deaths of the Ontario officers have focused attention on the stresses first responders face, Rob Jamieson said.

“I write this message with tears in my eyes, not in thinking of my own journey, but of those we have lost and their families left behind,” wrote Jamieson, head of the Ontario Provincial Police Association.

“This has been a personal journey and it is difficult to share this ... however, I do so in the hope that it may give some strength to hang on, to speak to someone, and to know you are not alone.”

Jamieson told the Canadian Press he wanted his almost 9,000 members to know that if a 20plus-year veteran like himself could run into difficulty, as he did four years ago, anyone can.

He cited the cumulative effects of investigating sexual assaults of children, dealing with violence and threats from outlaw motorcycle gangs, and responding to fatal car crashes.

“You see some of the worst things that you ever want to see,” he said.

“I’m not a doctor, but there is just no way that you cannot be affected by these things that you deal with on a daily basis — that just are not normal to see and are just not normal to experience.”

Vince Savoia, executive director of the Tema Conter Memorial Trust, which focuses on the mental health of first responders, said definitive statistics on first responder suicides are hard to come by.

But the suicide rate among police officers is roughly double the overall national average of 10 per 100,000 people, according to Tema.

For paramedics, the number is five times the average, reaching 56 per 100,000 in 2016.

Steven Skoworodko, who speaks for paramedics in Saskatchewan, said a colleague in Regina died by suicide on Wednesday, the third or fourth in the province in the past few years.

Savoia, a paramedic himself, said he battled for years after responding as a 27-year-old to the killing of Tema Conter, 25, in Toronto in 1988.

“When I looked at Tema for the first time, I thought it was my fiancée that had been raped and murdered,” he said. “Just making that one connection ... caused me to really struggle with guilt at not being able to save Tema’s life.”

What’s needed, he said, is a culture change in how we view mental health issues given the stigma they can carry, especially for first responders.

“We all feel that we have to maintain this bravado,” Savoia said.

“There have been documented cases unfortunately across the country where first responders have come forward and asked for help and they’ve been terminated from their jobs (or) on occasion are ridiculed by their own colleagues.”

In another case, two RCMP officers sued the force for how it dealt with the trauma they suffered after responding to the killing of four fellow officers near Mayerthorpe, Alta., in 2005.