Diaries tell tale of officers’ mental health

WHEN you are a police officer, your emotions have to be hidden or pushed down. Officers work hard to detach themselves from their emotions as a way to cope in a culture that has an expectation of silence in the face of trauma. This culture contributes to the increase in mental health issues in police officers and staff.

I should know. Policing is in my blood. I was a police officer for 18 years. I am a child of two police officers and my husband is a police officer. My dream was to become a detective chief Inspector, running murder enquiries. I made it to detective inspector. But then my world – and my mental health – came crashing down.

I was constantly reliving my investigations in intense detail. I was reviewing every death, every shooting, every kidnapping that I had investigated. Over and over, and over. I was terrified. I didn’t sleep because I was flooded with adrenalin and a physically crushing anxiety. The adrenaline coursing through my body had me on high alert 24/7, and I saw risk and danger everywhere I looked.

I struggled to leave work as there was always more that I could do, more that could be done to protect others and reduce the risk. But my mind was fragmenting as my brain tried to cope with all the detail I was scrutinising in an attempt to keep myself and everyone else safe.

When I was home, I wasn’t present because I was reliving the nightmares of the day. There wasn’t a single moment as a police officer that I experienced any respite from that fear. Finally, I had to make a choice: my mental health or my career. It broke my heart to step away from the job I loved. I kept my sanity, but the dream was over.

I didn’t let my investigative skills go to waste. I turned to academia to see if I could find out what the deeprooted problem was at the heart of policing. My doctorate examined the emotional culture of the police in England and Wales and its contribution to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in officers. I am now a chartered psychologist and academic researcher. I have been working to capture the emotional lives of police officers, to reveal how much pressure they are under to hide their true feelings and the ultimate consequences this has on their mental health.

At a time when police officers are also having to deal with public anger, it is worth thinking about the challenges they face as individuals daily and how that affects the kind of police service the public gets.

This “emotional silencing” was something I experienced as a serving officer. My subsequent study revealed I was not alone. What is far more troubling is that this emotionally stifling environment is contributing to PTSD in police officers, as it forces officers to dissociate from their emotions – a key contributor to PTSD.

I wanted to give police officers a voice. I used audio diaries to capture stories from individual officers, so I could assess the factors which were contributing to increasing levels of mental ill health.

A major theme emerged from the diaries: emotions are seen as a weakness and an indicator of incompetence, operating as unofficial performance measures. If you are caught displaying an emotional reaction, then you are considered unreliable and unfit.