Examining Mental Health Among Law Enforcement

Critical Incident Peer Support: Examining Mental Health among Law Enforcement
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Critical Incident Peer Support: Examining Mental Health among Law Enforcement
Law enforcement officers and personnel across the criminal justice system regularly encounter high-risk, high-stress situations. Crisis intervention is more than the immediate response to those situations; the mental health of the law enforcement officers during the aftermath and the long-term effects are more of a residual afterthought. A commonly understated step in the crisis intervention process is the critical incident peer support that is supposed to come after. After every police-involved shooting or major crisis, an assessment is conducted to determine if the officer is physically and mentally fit to return to work. Due to the nature of the profession, there is a stigma when it comes to mental health in law enforcement, "do not say anything that will get your badge and weapon taken away.” This mentality builds and promotes issues such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD to go without the proper treatment, which only further exacerbates them until it surmounts a critical event happening within criminal justice departments, the death of a police officer by suicide. In recent years, studies have explored that to try and fill in the knowledge gaps as it pertains to the effects that traumatic stress, secondary traumatic stress, and social pressure have on their personal and professional lives. Cerel et al. (2019) found that out of 813 police officer participants, 95% of the police officers suffered from nightmares or other trauma from a suicide call. This paper intends to provide further insight into the police officers' experiences and perspectives of suicide and suicidal ideation calls they respond to throughout their careers. There is an underlying need for specific interventions, such as critical incident peer support among law enforcement, which might improve the mental health and law enforcement officer responses to high-risk/high-stress calls in the long term.
Theoretical Approaches
This study draws on the strain theory of suicide and the organizational justice theory. The strain theory of suicide theory states that severe psychological strains afflict an individual contemplating suicide. The theory proposes four sources of strain leading to suicide: (1) Value strain from opposing values, (2) aspiration strain from the incongruity between reality and aspiration, (3) deprivation strain from relative deprivation like poverty, and (4) coping strain from deficit coping skills during a crisis (Zhang & Lester, 2008). Strains subject people to unbearable pressures, making them opt for suicide and suicide ideations. Such pressures manifest in various ways, including anger, frustration, bitterness, and physical and psychological pain.
In law enforcement, the strains are akin to regular stress experienced by police officers. The persistence of these strains leads to frustrations and anger, forcing the victims to devise a way of eliminating or reducing them (Bishopp, 2014). The inability to resolve the strains leaves individuals with suicide or suicidal ideation as a last resort. This theory is helpful in this study bec...