Mental Health Story
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From silence to support: A police officer’s journey through trauma, PTSD, and mental health stigma in law enforcement

US Police Detective Adam Meyers explores his mental health journey after a traumatic experience.

My name is Adam, and I have been a police officer in Wisconsin, US for 23 years. I am also a certified peer specialist in Wisconsin. I began my law enforcement career in 2001, following my service as an active-duty United States army military policeman. In April 2016, I was involved in a critical incident that changed my life forever when I used deadly force on someone who armed themselves with a hatchet inside a busy department store. This person died.

I suffered in silence for many years after my critical incident, and I am ashamed for the ways I poorly coped. I still feel shame for the ways I coped and treated people. I find it hard to believe that nobody realised or even had a gut feeling that I was not doing well. I could not have been that good at hiding my poor coping strategies, or was I? I have always wondered if people were slowly watching me self-destruct because they did not know what to say to me, how to help me, or they simply did not want to get involved.

You shared how deeply your critical incident affected you. What led you to finally seek therapy?

On December 31, 2021, I was the police department’s only detective, but I was assigned to work a patrol shift for New Year's Eve. I sat down in my patrol vehicle, and almost immediately thought to myself, ‘Forget it.  I’m done. I quit. I’m not doing this anymore’.  I contacted my Sergeant, and we went to speak with my Chief.  I advised my Chief that I was done being a police officer and that I wanted to resign effective immediately. My Chief did not accept my verbal resignation and relieved me of my patrol shift. I went home to take some time to return to a better state of mind and think about if I truly wanted to resign as a police officer.

About two weeks had passed, and I realised that I did not want to resign from being a police officer. I believe my initial desire to resign was that I wanted to seek the appropriate mental health treatment because the way I had been negatively coping for years was not working for me.

I contacted my Chief, and he informed me that I needed to have a psychological assessment completed and fitness for duty assessment before I returned to work. During the last week of January 2022, I had the fitness for duty assessment completed.

I was diagnosed with major depressive disorder and PTSD with acute stress - with dissociative features by the police department’s psychologist, and deemed unfit for duty. This meant I was not able to return to work and needed to undergo intense psychotherapy, eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (EMDR), biofeedback, and dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT).

Based on your experience, what advice would you give to therapists working with first responders?

It is important to establish a level of trust and understanding with a first responder. They will not share what they are experiencing unless they can truly trust you. If they believe anything they tell you will be used against them, and you have the potential to get them dismissed, and ruin their career they will not confide in you. Police officers and first responders are mandated to maintain good mental and physical health. This results in possible scrutiny by the people they work with and or their supervisors if their mental and physical health are questioned. Some police officers and first responders are dying by suicide because they aren’t confident that if they ask for help everything will be OK.  Unfortunately, most of them are correct in thinking this way in the US. 

The public safety profession is a high-stress environment that has been associated with mental health issues. Public safety professionals who openly seek help for anxiety, depression, emotional disorders or post-traumatic stress often face personal or professional criticism, discrimination, and sometimes dismissal. This shouldn’t deter them from seeking help, but it does. We need to work together to stop the stigma.

To overcome the mental health stigma in the public safety profession, those public safety professionals who suffer from mental health issues must learn to understand, accept and determine what is needed to treat it. It’s time to become part of the solution, and work with those suffering to make mental health issues stigma-free.

Public safety professionals need to be able to trust the leaders and colleagues of their departments to recognise the obstacles and stigmas associated with mental health. They need to feel comfortable and confident that, if they are involved in a critical incident and later struggle with mental health issues from the incident, help will be available with no strings attached.