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Roger Moore’s voice breaks as he points to his dog, Izzy, who is asleep on the floor. “This terror down here…” The retired firefighter stops, his eyes filling with tears. His wife, Karen, whose eyes are also watering, hears the washing machine beep and quickly gets up. She climbs over Izzy, as Roger begins his story again.
It was February 2017, and his wife and daughters, Lauren, 22, and Hayley, 21, were at work when he “suddenly started to dip”. Roger, 56, had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) a couple of months earlier. He had experienced suicidal thoughts, but nothing this severe. “I felt like I was falling into a black hole and if I got to the bottom, I was going
‘I checked on the Christmas turkey… and saw a burnt body from 20 years ago’
to top myself,” he recalls. “I had always thought I was in charge of my mind, but in that moment, I realised my mind controlled me.”
Izzy, a Rottweiler, was asleep in the kitchen when Roger started his silent descent. “She doesn’t do lovey-dovey stuff, but she ran in and absolutely flattened me,” he says. “She jumped on the settee and totally brought me out of it.” Roger pulled on his coat, clipped on Izzy’s lead and took her for a walk. He has no idea how she sensed that something was so terribly wrong.
As he finishes the story, Karen, 55, returns with a tissue scrunched in her hand. “When Roger wasn’t in a very good place, he couldn’t stand beeping appliances,” she explains. “Everyone in our house gets up as soon as the washing machine, microwave, fridge and dishwasher go off.”
The exact number of firefighters suffering from PTSD is unclear, but Roger is one of thousands to have sought support from the Fire Fighters Charity, which helps 5,000 people at its centres annually. The Chief Fire Officers Association estimates that 41,000 fire service shifts are lost every year in England and Wales because of mental health issues.
Karen sits next to Roger and touches his hand. The past three years have been tough for the couple, who after 40 years of marriage are considering leaving the family home to help escape Roger’s memories. On his arm, a tattoo explains the problem: “I wish my head could forget what my eyes have seen.”
Roger doesn’t attribute his PTSD to one major incident, but to a build-up of stress throughout his 30-year career. Describing himself as “the grim reaper”, he estimates that he has seen 35 people die. A fire service culture of “man up and shut up” camaraderie, mixed with macabre humour, meant there were few opportunities to deal with such traumatic events.
“You can have someone in your arms who doesn’t even look human because of horrendous injuries,” Roger explains. “They take their last breath in front of you, then 20 minutes later you’re back in an office.”
This meant he often felt like a “pressure cooker that was permanently about to blow” – stress that he would release when he got home. “If you could convert my verbal anger into physical aggression, I would be locked up,” he says. “What happened to me in the fire service has damaged my kids. My nastiness to them on occasions over the past 10 years has moulded their lives. That upsets me a lot.”
It wasn’t until after an incident in Sainsbury’s in autumn 2016 that Roger knew he had PTSD. He had been retired for three years when a tannoy announcement – “bing bong, cashier to the till please” – gave him a panic attack. “I found myself closing down,” he says. “I was terrified. If someone had tried to help me I probably would have beaten them to death.”
From then on, loud and repetitive noises, resembling a fire station alert system, would prompt Roger’s body to shut down. It was only after a course of Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR) – a form of psychotherapy in which the patient recalls trauma while following an object with their eyes – that Roger was able to visit a supermarket again.
As his condition worsened, Roger started to get more flashbacks, including one on Christmas Day 2016, while cooking the turkey. “I looked in the oven and saw the burnt chest of a dead body I had seen at work 20 years previously,” he says. Karen found Roger sitting at the bottom of the stairs, crying and banging his head against the wall. “At that point, I knew we were in trouble,” he adds.
First, he called the West Midlands Fire Service, from where he had retired as a station manager, but claims he was told to “go away”. “They said as I’m retired I’m not any of their responsibility,” he says. West Midlands Fire Service says it offers pre-retirement courses for employees and that once staff leave it refers them to The Fire Fighters Charity. “If we were approached by an ex-employee, our response would be to signpost them to the relevant support mechanism, with The Fire Fighters Charity being our primary point of support,” it said in a statement.
The NHS, Roger also claims, was “beyond useless” and says it took almost two years from an initial consultation for any treatment. “I would be dead if I didn’t have money,” he adds. But with the help of The Fire Fighters Charity, Roger started seeing a therapist almost immediately. He undertook EMDR and meditation, as well as spending two weeks at the charity’s recovery centre, Harcombe House, in Devon.
Yet it isn’t just Roger who has struggled; his family have also been living with PTSD for the best part of a decade. “We look at the victim and forget that there’s fallout around them,” says Roger. “The horrible thing is my wife doesn’t have the husband she married, and my children don’t have the dad they were brought up with.”
Karen, an inquiry officer with the West Midlands police, thinks there is an epidemic of PTSD in the emergency services. “It’s going to be a real big thing that we need to get to grips with,” she says. “It’s scary to see your husband who has always been a strong person reduced to tears by noise and people – everyday things that we think of as normal, but he can’t cope with.”
Although Roger’s condition has improved, he is still haunted by flashbacks. “My understanding is that I’ve got this for life and I have to learn to cope,” he says. “But I worry that if I relapse, I might not survive this time.”