First Responders & The Problem

There is an epidemic going on right under our noses. It is not a disease, it is something far more sinister and far easier to solve, and doing so can point all of us in the right direction when it comes to our mental health, sense of purpose, and overall wellness.

First responders are experiencing incredibly high levels of both physical and mental illness. This is true for many professions (think firefighters, military, healthcare) but for our purposes today, we are going to look at law enforcement officers. Law enforcement officers alone are 1.5 times more likely to die by suicide than the general population. In, fact, more law enforcement officers die by suicide than in the line of duty. This paints a sobering picture, and raises a few very important questions. What is it about this line of work that is so distressing to so many that work in it, and how can we prevent this from being the case? As it stands right now, the most dangerous thing to a law enforcement officer (as in, the thing most likely to end their life) is not someone else with a gun, it is their own mind. We don't even need to look far to find examples of this affecting officers behavior on-duty, leading to worse outcomes for both officers and the people they are sworn to protect.

There are a few very good reasons for this. Our police officers have to be prepared for the worst at all times. We train our officers to think up worst-case scenarios and prepare how we would respond in those cases. This builds a habit of preparing for the worst, leaving behind this moment in order to prepare for something that may or may not actually happen. This is no doubt a necessary part of the job, but it comes with some problems. This is essentially training the brain to develop anxiety. Mental habits are a very important part of our cognition, and we are literally training our officers to be more anxious, and then refusing to teach them how to turn that off and how to recognize when that is starting to affect their lives.

Since these are jobs that have to be done around the clock, there is also the matter of sleep deprivation. We now know that sleep is a cornerstone to health and wellness, and quality sleep is absolutely necessary for essentially all other bodily functions (think healing, appetite, metabolism). This is to say that when sleep goes, everything else takes a hit. This includes emotional processing, which, as we will learn shortly, is key to improving officer mental health.

Law enforcement officers are exposed to every kind of stress imaginable. The advice is the same across the country: you can not relax while you are on duty. I remember being told that I should always be ready for something bad to happen, forget about the fact that the mind can spin up all manner of unlikely but technically feasible scenario. Over time, this mental habit also becomes engrained if we do not actively work to deactivate it at times. This constant, low level stress is no doubt contributing to the plethora of mental health issues we see in law enforcement officers, and likely contributing to the high rate of physical illness we see as well. This is not even taking the more acute, high-level stressors that law enforcement officers often go through, with (however many) officers in the US reporting symptoms of PTSD. This number is likely less than the actual number, due to the stigma around help-seeking that still exists at departments around the country today.

This culture prevents officers from seeking help when they need it. Very few of the officers who died by suicide since 2015 sought help beforehand. Surveys show that 90% of officers feel that stigma is a major barrier to seeking mental health resources, 34% of officers have anxiety disorders, 40% have sleep disorders, and police officers show nearly double the rates of depression compared to the general public.

Officers have to deal with sleep interruptions, both chronic low-level and acute high-level stressors, barriers to pursuing mental healthcare, and a lack of education on the (very well known) risks of the job. This is a recipe for disaster, and has resulted in problems in many different areas, from the outcomes for the people the police are sworn to protect, to the outcomes for the officers’ families.

Many of you may have seen the video of the officer who mistook an acorn falling on his car for a suppressed 9mm, and acted accordingly, firing into his squad car, which was occupied by a (handcuffed) adult male. How many times have you heard of an officer being convicted of domestic violence, or driving while intoxicated? These are not things that someone with a regulated, healthy nervous system does. It is easy to look at these events and say “yup, I knew it, cops are scumbags and here is the proof!” but I propose a different scenario. What if most officers go into the job looking to be real-life superheroes, dedicating their lives to helping the people around them and improving the lives of others? Nearly every police recruit, if asked, will say that they want to help people. Some have their own stories of viewing police officers in a positive light, and wanting to provide that service to others, but none of them are adequately prepared for how difficult and all-consuming the job can actually be.

The constant, low-level stress is deleterious for all aspects of health, especially mental health. We now know that unfelt emotions get stored in the body, and this is the case with both mild and extremely salient emotions. Do you think that officers are really feeling and processing the emotions they come into contact with in the moment? No, they are dealing with the situation at hand, putting their emotions aside to help the public in their times of need. There is no way around this, officers can’t exactly break down every time they are upset on the job, they have to stuff it down and keep going. But, these emotions have to be felt eventually, and this brings us to the next problem.

Because of the stigma around speaking up about mental health in these circles, officers are often reluctant to request or take medications. We can argue all day about whether medications are beneficial or necessary for most, but there is no doubt that at least some officers out there would benefit greatly from medication, even temporarily. However, in many departments across the country, admin finding out about an officer taking medication like this could result in that officer loosing his or her job. In an effort to feel better in the absence of professionally prescribed medications, many officers self medicate with alcohol when they clock out (some don’t even wait to clock out. If that isn’t indicative of what I’m talking about, I don’t know what is). This further depletes their ability to rest, heal, and process emotions.

If we continue to ignore this problem due to a fear of being seen as weak, we will destroy ourselves in the process. My time as a first responder has highlighted the need for education and resources for law enforcement officers across the country. The advice is the same as it has been for centuries, and it is as follows:

Our first responders not only have to deal with acute, highly stressful events, but they have to be prepared at all times, creating this low-level, constant stress that is just as damaging over time. If we are expected to do this career for 30 years, we need to learn to deal with this stress. We have known for centuries that the way to deal with all the bullshit in the mind is through a consistent practice of mindful movement, and there is a growing body of research that confirms this knowledge. This is the main benefit of yoga, tai chi, qi gong, and the many other eastern traditional movement practices. We now know that our emotions are processed in the body (especially for men!), practicing mindful movement is one of the best ways to calm the mind down and bring it back to the present moment, something that is necessary for our first responders.

In cases of trauma, the mind and body tend to get stuck in a fear-response. The alarm bells that signal danger never really turn off. This leads to a whole host of issues, not the least of which are issues with sleep and recovery. We know these are closely linked and very important for our well-being. In order to exit the fight or flight response, we need to get the mind and body to move through the trauma, however small, and back into the present moment. This is the only way for our first responders to take back control of their minds and bodies. First responders, more than anyone, need to train this ability to bring themselves into the present moment and out of the experiences they have had and the ones they have yet to have.

Cultural change is notoriously slow, but not impossible. If we are to see this problem alleviated, we are going to have to consciously put effort into changing how we see and think about mental health for first responders (Dahl, 2026).

At least 55% of officers that died by suicide between 2016 and 2022 did not have any prior attempts, and only 23% of them sought any type of help. Resources are great and necessary, but mean nothing when the people that need them most are too afraid to even consider using them.

You may notice that all of these solutions lie in the individual. This is exactly the point: empowering the individual to change their mood and get their lives back. This change is not going to happen overnight, it has to be built on a growing body of individuals that take their own mental health (their own destiny, if you want to call it that) into their own hands.

In a perfect world, we would prevent all of our officers from even getting to this point. This highlights the need for education in police academies about this kind of work. While current resiliency programs and classes do a relatively good job of encouraging recruits to seek help when they need it, this is just one small part of a much larger solution. You can only heal as much as your nervous system will allow you to, and if your body has learned that it is unsafe to feel emotions or relax, you will get little to no benefit from therapy even if you do get the courage to seek it out in an environment that (whether it is stated or not) is full of people who would really rather you didn't. Since essentially every officer is exposed to that chronic, low-level stress, it would make sense to educate officers on mindfulness and the subtleties of how emotions feel in the body. In fact, police officers should really be the best at this out of anyone, since they have to deal with these stressors so often.

The officers who are the best at their jobs, the ones who truly make a difference in the world and our communities, are the ones that have empathy for their fellow man. Those that can really feel what the people they protect are going through, and care deeply enough to go above and beyond are the ones that often suffer the most from these problems. We need to make the job work for them, otherwise we will end up with departments across the country that are full of officers who don’t possess this capacity for empathy. This would be like hiring people based solely on personality (more on that later…). Of course we are human too, and everyone is flawed, but who do you think is going to bridge this gap between the police and so many of the communities they set out to protect? Someone who is afraid of their own shadow, or someone who is secure in their emotional experience?

Now, you may be thinking to yourself: “This is all well and good, but I am not a first responder, I don't know any and I don't see how this applies to my life.” I wonder if there is some other behavior that many of us engage in that is affecting our relationships, sleep, and stress levels. Maybe something like social media? This is not just a problem for first responders, they are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine. Not only do healthier police officers, firefighters, dispatchers, EMTs, nurses, and doctors contribute to a happier and healthier society, their struggles give us a preview of what awaits all of us if we do not act now to figure this out. If we are to run headfirst into a world with more addictive technology that is better at leveraging our emotions, we need to figure out how to live without letting it destroy us.

I will leave you with this: Those that continue to thanklessly sacrifice their holidays, time with family, and sleep deserve to wake up and be excited to live life. You deserve to wake up and be excited to live life. The solution always lies in the individual, but we are stronger together. If you are a first responder and you are struggling; you are not, by any stretch of the imagination, alone, and life does not have to be this way. In fact, it can be far lighter and more fulfilling than you can imagine.

Causes of law enforcement deaths. National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. (2026, March 12). https://nleomf.org/memorial/facts-figures/officer-fatality-data/causes-of-law-enforcement-deaths/

Dahl, H. (2026, March 25). Law enforcement suicide statistics: Market data report 2026. Gitnux. https://gitnux.org/law-enforcement-suicide-statistics/#sources