Officer fi nds experience can bring help to others
The 911 calls from a house on the Northeast Side were tying up Columbus police officers and paramedics almost every night.
The caller would either hang up or keep the line open, saying nothing to the operator. When officers arrived at the home, they usually found the caller, a man in his 60s, so intoxicated that he was unable to communicate with them.
“It became very frustrating,” said Officer Brian Goudy, who often responded to the calls on his 11 p.m.to-7 a.m. shift. “The guys in the precinct were getting upset.”
Looking to get a handle on the problem, Goudy began stopping at the house every night at the beginning of his shift to check on the man. They slowly developed a relationship that led to a revelation — the man was a Vietnam veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.
Goudy knew who to call for help. Officer Jamie Ingles, who once patrolled the precinct, is a combat veteran who has been open about his own struggles with PTSD.
Ingles helped put the man in touch with services
available through the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Though the man learned that he wasn’t financially eligible for the services, Goudy has continued to work with him and got him admitted to a hospital for a two-week stay in August. The man isn’t drinking as much, Goudy said, and the nuisance calls to 911 have stopped.
It is among the success stories that have grown out of Ingles’ single-minded determination to raise awareness and train officers in how to react when they encounter crisis situations involving veterans with PTSD — some of which can be highly volatile.
For more than two years, Ingles has given presentations about PTSD to officers from Columbus and other law-enforcement agencies, told his own story, and explained the best way to respond to those whose mental-health issues are related to their military service.
“I am broken,” Ingles tells those who attend the training sessions he’s developed. He shares the combat experiences, including the deaths of fellow soldiers, that left him a different person, and the treatment that allows him to deal with the trauma.
“Broken,” he makes clear, means he’s forever changed — but not destroyed.
Ingles, a 39-year-old Columbus native, has been an officer with the Columbus Division of Police since 2002. As a member of the Army and the Army National Guard, he was deployed four times, including to combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, from 1998 through 2012.
It was upon his return from his third deployment to Iraq in 2010 that his emotional state began to unravel, he said.
“Even the drive home was full of anxiety,” Ingles said. “Everything was a threat. In the short time I was home, I had anger issues, anxiety out in public, I was depressed. It was kind of like a rollercoaster ride. I didn’t resort to alcohol or drugs or violence. I just kept it all in, which made it worse.”
He visited doctors at the VA and was diagnosed with PTSD. But his initial counseling was ineffective, he said, and by the time he was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011, his first marriage had ended in divorce.
“I was in a worse place” after returning in 2012, he said. That’s when a fellow veteran suggested that he try a treatment program for PTSD known as “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.”
“It retrains your brain to fully understand that you can live with these things and deal with these things,” he said. “It saved my life.”
It also put him on a mission to help others.
Lt. Tim Sansbury, who oversees the division’s basic training, was aware of Ingles’ story. He also knew there were plenty of other officers returning from military deployments.
In March 2015, they put together a panel of 10 officers, including Ingles, who were willing to speak to an audience of fellow officers about their struggles with PTSD.
“These guys were extremely courageous to stand in front of their peers and describe their experiences and their trouble transitioning back to civilian life,” Sansbury said.
Since then, Ingles “has continued to carry that torch,” Sansbury said. “He just keeps pressing forward with it.”
The training program that Ingles developed educates officers and dispatchers about PTSD, how to recognize its symptoms, questions to ask veterans about their service and experiences, and where to take or refer them for help. He also encourages follow-up with the veterans after the initial contact, much like the work that Officer Goudy has done with the man who used to call 911.
Ingles’ program has been incorporated into the division’s curriculum for officers who receive Crisis Intervention Training to become specialists in dealing with those experiencing a mentalhealth crisis.
“A lot of veterans in crisis want to talk to another veteran,” Ingles said.
About the same time he began his training campaign, he got married to a fellow officer, Elizabeth Ingles, with whom he has a 2-yearold son.
He continues to deal with PTSD, he said.
“I still recognize that I lose my coping skills if I don’t have someone reminding me,” he said. “So I may have to go and have a tune-up and get into some treatment and get those reminders to say, ‘Hey, this is what you have to do when times get tough.’”