Emergency responders are at a heightened risk for mental health challenges. Firefighters, paramedics and police are regularly exposed to psychological trauma due to the nature of their work, with additional potential for serious injury or death on the job. Coupled with generally stressful work, the mental health challenges often compound, putting emergency responders at elevated risk for mental health challenges like posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Eric Meyer, department chair and professor of counseling and behavioral health in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, is working to prevent some of those risks in firefighters.
Meyer works directly with fire academies to incorporate emotion regulation skills training into the training that fire service trainees receive. This training helps firefighters better understand what emotions are, why they are adaptive, and why having skills for regulating emotions is important. Specific skills that are taught include using mindfulness to increase awareness of emotional experiences and using cognitive flexibility to look at stressful situations from a different perspective so that they don’t get “locked in” on an unhelpful interpretation of the situation. An added benefit of this approach is that all training is done by peers, rather than mental health professionals, who may not have sufficient knowledge and experience regarding emergency response.
“Fire service has a really robust peer support program already,” says Meyer. “The fact that they are so well established allowed us to partner with their peer support specialists to deliver this innovative training right in the academy. Receiving this type of training from a peer rather than from a mental health professional increases credibility and likely increases firefighter trainees’ acceptance of the need to learn and practice these kinds of skills.”
In Meyer’s study, half of the trainees receive basic education regarding mental health, which is what trainees typically receive during the academy. The other half receive the novel emotion regulation skills training developed by Meyer and his team. Both trainings are peer-delivered to control for the influence of receiving some form of mental health training from an experienced peer. The research team follows up with the trainees on a regular basis after the initial training, during their first two years in fire service, to observe whether differences in mental health symptoms emerge between the groups. The study is currently at its midpoint. Once completed, the team will have a more robust understanding of different approaches to preventing PTSD as firefighters enter the workforce.
“PTSD was not an official diagnosis until the 1980s. Then in the 1990s and 2000s the field worked to develop and investigate evidence-based treatments,” says Meyer. “Seeing where we’ve come from, it’s amazing to be one of the first groups figuring out methods of preventing PTSD before it even develops.”
Learn more about Meyer's work.
Author: Annaliese Daniels