Police need better resources, experts say
Canada lacks effective treatment delivery and co-ordinated first-responder suicide tracking
TORONTO — Some recent suicides among Canada’s police officers have mental health advocates redoubling calls for more aggressive government action and greater public sympathy for the emotional well-being of law enforcement professionals.
Traumatic encounters on the job coupled with stressful working conditions and challenging cultures of silence leave police vulnerable to mental health stress, they said, arguing the issue is comparable in scope to the more high-profile challenges the country’s military community faces.
The most recent case of apparent suicide, according to media reports, was Staff Sgt. Kal Ghadban, a 22-year veteran of the Ottawa police force.
Canada doesn’t have a central database to track police suicides, but a recent effort to document the problem has some people drawing striking parallels. The Tema Conter Memorial Trust, which works to raise awareness of the mental health concerns faced by first responders, began logging police suicides in late April.
In just over five months, the group said it recorded 12 instances where actively serving officers took their own lives. The group said each case was verified with individual police forces or other first responders before being formally recorded as a suicide.
Tema executive director Vince Savoia said the numbers are comparable to a sharp spike in military suicides last year that had the Department of National Defence fielding harsh criticism from the opposition. In a threemonth stretch from November 2013 to February 2014, the military recorded 10 confirmed suicides.
Savoia said the comparable numbers are not altogether surprising, considering the similar challenges faced by both soldiers and police. Both groups tend to attract driven, ambitious people who are averse to admitting weakness.
This natural reticence becomes enhanced by an internal culture that discourages signs of perceived weakness and is further reinforced by a more broad-based social stigma toward those struggling with mental illness, he said.
“The expectation within society is that this is a career that police officers choose, and as such they should be prepared,” Savoia said.
“Far too often I’ve heard the comment, ‘You’ll get no sympathy from me because that’s the career you chose and you should have known that you’d be encountering these sorts of situations.’ ”
There is no national initiative to track suicides within the country’s numerous police forces or co-ordinate efforts to treat mental illness within their diverse ranks, said Terry Coleman of the Police Mental Health Liaison, a research group originally established by the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police.
“It can be everything from the management and supervisory style, archaic or impractical policies of an organization, just the physical workplace environment. It sounds mundane when you spell them out one at a time, but collectively they cause all sorts of stress in a workplace,” Coleman said.
If monitoring suicide rates among Canada’s police is a haphazard effort, offering treatment is even more so.
Savoia said each individual police force is responsible for providing its own mental health supports, which often amount to an employee assistance program offering a limited number of telephone consultations.
Some offer benefits plans that cover a handful of sessions with community psychologists, forcing those seeking help to join lengthy waiting lists to seek free psychiatric assistance. Some forces offer peer support groups for officers to discuss issues, while others, such as the RCMP, have mental health professionals on staff.
Savoia said provincial governments could improve the situation by increasing funding to make local mental health resources more accessible and affordable. But the most important drivers of change, he said, must be the attitudes of police themselves.