Episode 9: Police Mental Health and Wellness

Studies show that a police officer experiences as many traumatic events in 6 months as the average person does across their entire lifetime.  These stressful experiences can build up within an officer and lead to any number of personal and professional problems.  For several decades there has been some recognition by policing to the impact of stress, and this has increased their willingness to do something about it.  This episode will explore some of the current research into the mental health services available to the police.

Main Topics
•What are the views of police officers with respect to accessing mental health services?
•What are the perceptions of sworn officers and civilian personnel about the current state of mental health in law enforcement 
•[What are some of the policy implications for police leaders regarding getting mental health services into the agency.

Dr. Padilla can be contacted at kepadil@txstate.edu

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Transcript

Welcome to the police in service training podcast. This podcast is dedicated to providing
research evidence to street level police officers and command staff alike. The program is intended
to help the police and law enforcement community create better programs, understand challenging
policies and dispel myths of police officer behavior. I'm your host, Scott Phillips.
In an earlier episode, we discussed police humor and one of the intended goals of humor
was to provide a coping mechanism for occupational stress. In that episode, Dr. Gayadeen suggested
that humor was similar to casting a magic spell. Unfortunately, long-term stress may
not be dispensed with the wave of a wand. Studies show that a police officer experiences
as many traumatic events in six months as the average person does across their entire
lifetime. As we know, policing is occupied by different people with varied backgrounds.
Some of them may be able to handle the stress fairly well. Others, however, while these
stressful experiences can build up within an officer and lead to any number of personal
and professional problems. For several decades, there has been some recognition by policing
to the impact of stress, and this has increased their willingness to try to do something about
In the 1980s, for example, some police agencies required police officers to see a psychologist
if an officer had been involved in a shooting. Mandating the attendance reduced the stigma.
In the past few years, the topic of police stress and officer mental health has, like
many other issues, become more important to the police field. It has also become the subject
of research. I'm very happy that Dr. Kathleen Padilla has joined us on the podcast today.
Kathleen is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice and Criminology
at the Texas State University at San Marcos. Dr. Padilla received her B.H.D. from Arizona
State University in 2021, where she also completed a postdoctoral research fellowship evaluating
a police officer wellness program. She has several publications that focus on police
and their mental health, and we're going to dig into them today. Welcome, Kathleen.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.
I'm great. I'm really happy you were able to join us today. So you graduated just a
few years ago. Can you give us an overview of why you became interested in mental health
of police officers? Was it part of your background?
Sure, sure. So I like to make sure I emphasize that I am not an officer, never have been
a sworn officer, but I did grow up around a police department. I have family and policing,
I spent a lot of my childhood in and around police officers and their working environment.
And I very clearly remember when my stepdad retired from policing, I remember thinking,
he made it to retirement. He didn't die in the line of duty. He didn't die by suicide.
And I thought, wow, if this is so stressful for me being a family member of an officer,
how stressful must this be for the officers themselves?
So once I started graduate school, I started focusing on officer wellness and mental health
and ways to improve their working environment. Oh, very good. That's interesting. I've talked
to several people who have no connection at all other than their graduate work. Some have
been police officers, but this is somewhat of an indirect but kind of an interesting
perspective for people to be watching the occupation and feel similar emotional components
that the officers do. That's interesting. From a broader perspective, why is this area of
mental health, this area of inquiry you're doing, why is it of value and relevance to the police?
Yeah. So I mean, beyond just making sure that officers themselves are mentally,
emotionally, physically healthy, right? We want to reduce levels of burnout. We were in the middle
of a recruitment and retention crisis in policing. So we want to do what we can to keep officers on
the job. But beyond that, it's also this public health and public safety issue,
if we have officers that are sleep deprived, that are burnt out, that are not managing their mental
health very well at all, it can impact their decision-making, their levels of empathy,
how well they're interacting with citizens in the community. And so of course, we can see how that
could lead down the road to some of those high-profile encounters that we've seen on the
news. So it benefits everybody, the community and the officers and the organization itself
to focus on officer wellness. It's interesting that you're taking the perspective of the agencies
because officer wellness, the problems of stress have also been found to contribute to not just
burnout on the job, but the divorce, alcoholism and those kinds of things and the personal life.
But you're 100% right that on the job, poor decisions on the job, not that a poor decision
in your family life is a good idea, but poor decisions on the job can impact the agency,
the entire policing field. In my opening comment, I mentioned that some police agencies mandated
that a police officer visit a staff psychologist if they're involved in a shooting. When I worked
in Houston, they didn't have a staff psychologist, but they had a department, a doctor's office
on retainer, a minor difference as far as I'm concerned. But if you know, and I know this is
not necessarily part of your research, but when did the issue of police officer mental health and
wellness really take off? Yeah. So if you look even in the late 90s, early 2000s, research really
kind of started ramping up on this topic, but really the president's task force on 21st century
policing, the task force in 2015, so already a decade ago, gave officer wellness and safety
its own kind of focus, one of the six pillars of ways that we can improve relationships with
the community. So between probably about 2007 to 2015, agencies in the community and the public
kind of started to become more aware of it. Research in general now on the topic has grown
exponentially in the last decade or so. So we now know a ton about a bunch of different areas of
officer wellness, definitely more so now than we knew even a decade ago. Excellent. Okay, so you
mentioned the 21st century task force on policing, and it's hard to believe that that was actually
10 years ago, but since it was when I was reading the article, I know you had mentioned this in
there as well. Is there any evidence of this study in researching officer stress across the country
or even into other countries? Because obviously most of us know that depending on how you count
them, 15 to 18,000 police agencies, sworn officers out there that carry a badge and a gun, is this
spreading throughout all those agencies? Certainly I think more and more agencies now,
obviously the larger the agency, the more resources you have, but more and more agencies
are focusing on at the very least having an employee assistance program, an EAP, or a staff
psychologist. But definitely more and more of them are implementing different types of wellness
interventions, whether that's a peer support program, a fitness incentive type of program.
But the issue is because everything is so specialized to that department,
everything is incredibly tailor-made to what that department is needing at the time. So it makes
comparing the effectiveness of any of these interventions really difficult to do. And when
we look at a meta-analytic perspective from a higher aggregate level, it doesn't look like
these programs are super effective simply because there's so much variety in the personnel being
exposed to these programs, the outcomes that they're looking at. So there's a lot of variability there
that makes it look like some of these programs may be less effective than they are.
Right. You mentioned larger agencies would have better resources. Like I said, Houston had a
psychologist office on retainer and what is it, 89%? 90% of police agencies have less than 50
officers. So they're not going to have the resources for anything much more than an employee
assistance program. And so as you say, you can't study an employee assistance program
against a staff psychologist. Those are apples and oranges. You can't study them and compare the two.
Now, I wanted to dig into something just a little bit because I thought this was interesting in the
article. Can you explain the difference between occupational stress and organizational stress,
particularly when it comes to policing? Yeah, yeah, of course. So in policing,
organizational sources of stress are those that are shared with other jobs. So these are things
that are not inherent to being an officer, excessive paperwork, maybe you're dealing with a boss who's
a bit of a jerk from time to time, overtime, things like that, that are kind of shared with
other jobs. And then you have occupational sources of stress. These are sometimes called
operational or environmental, depending on whose work you're reading. And these are things that
are inherent to being an officer. So writing traffic tickets, delivering death notifications,
being involved in a critical incident, like an officer involved shooting, things like that,
that are more acute, more they're rare, but they are high intensity. Right. You mentioned they're
rare. Well, you just mentioned death notices. That's something that I had to do. I remember
one very clearly. And, and I thought to myself, this, this obviously sucks for them. There's no
other way to describe it. It was very uncomfortable for all of us including myself. So it was, you
know, this is not a family member myself, but you could, you had to empathize and you had to really
feel sorry for what was going on. And it was really difficult for myself and my partner who
had to do it. And we also had another episode, which was, it was more of a personal nature for
the victim. I didn't want to get into it. It wasn't for me, but again, because it was such a
devastating trauma for the victim, you could not help, but feel empathy for the person. And then
that still bled over into us a little bit because the stress of coming home and having to deal with
just that situation and feeling it for the other person, it lasted for a little while.
And now I want to dig into one of the first studies I read from, from your research. And
this one examined mental health services. Can you give us a quick overview of what that study was
about and maybe how you collected the data? Yeah. So this, this study came from my,
my master's thesis and my doctoral dissertation. And I surveyed an agency in Southern New Mexico,
midsize to large, depending on how you look at the numbers, about 180. And I just surveyed them on
sources of stress, on ways that they currently cope with stress, services that they knew or didn't
know about, willingness to access services. And then a couple of other, other things were just
kind of general recommendations. So that was a pen and paper survey. I went to three briefings
a day for five days and, you know, stood there while they, while they completed their survey,
hence the amazing response rate, right? It's a lot harder to say no to somebody in person.
Yeah, that's the way to do it. So I was able to get a lot of really rich information about officer
willingness to access services, which was the most interesting finding to me. So when I,
when I asked, you know, how willing are you to access mental health services, just very generally,
it was about 40% of respondents said, yes, I think, which was still more than I thought would.
But whenever I phrase it in a more proactive way, some more educational, would you be willing
to take part in a mental health checkup similar to a physical health checkup or an emotional
wellness class? That number rose to, I think, about 66, 67%. So what that really showed me was,
you know, hey, if we're advertising these services in just a very proactive way, another tool for
your tool belt, just something to help you rather than something that's potentially punitive,
has the potential to, you know, take your weapon from you. We might get a lot more people willingly
seeking out these services. So 40%, I was surprised to hear that number, because obviously the
barriers have been there for decades, right? People are resistant to go and talk to somebody
else because, you know, when I did it, and I suspect it's the same thing now, it's a sign of
weakness of some kind. But when you phrase it as, as you said, a checkup, like a physical checkup,
that, you know, it takes away the stigma of that term. And something else flashed into my
head as you were saying this, the opportunities these days, just in general, you learn about these
things by existing web-based phone conversations. So maybe police agencies can get these as part of
this way. You're not having to go there, take the time to go there. The fear of bumping into
another officer who might recognize you. So that would be an interesting approach for these kinds
of services. Absolutely. But knowing about them, that was something you just mentioned, they weren't
even completely familiar with them? Correct. Yeah. So this department at the time, they had an EAP,
and then I believe they had one or two other really, really small, like just barely implemented
types of services. But they didn't offer very much. And so respondents, the officers here didn't
really know what those services were. They didn't know how to go about accessing them,
even if there were services. So they didn't know like who to talk to. And they were obviously very
cautious about who they wanted to approach. You know, hey, how do I get access to this type of
program? And be careful who you're asking about those things. So yeah, a little bit of a lack of
transparency in the services being offered, as well as the procedures to get to those services.
Yeah, that's interesting. They weren't familiar with them. And then sure, accessing them.
Okay, Sarge, who do I talk to about? I don't want to ask that question. Because then it exposes me
as a potential. And then the Sarge, depending on who the Sargeant is, the street supervisor,
do you talk to them or do you not? Now, in your conclusion of this particular article,
you had suggested the view of law enforcement, that it's starting to shift in the direction of
accepting these services. Because again, 40%. And then when you change the name, 60%, that's
pretty good. I think those numbers are decent. Now, I've read a lot of policing research in
other areas, and they often assert the same basic idea about their topic. For example,
in a recent podcast about Academy training, Dr. Straw, he had suggested the same thing about
shifting to a guardian mindset in the Academy training away from away from the the warrior
mindset. But as we all know, change in policing can take place at a glacial speed. Now, what's
your, again, your professional opinion? What's your opinion on this help seeking? Is it really
changing? Yeah, so I would agree that it is. And there are a couple of important distinctions
here. One, so society as a whole is becoming more accepting and less stigmatizing of discussion
surrounding mental health and accessing services. So as you know, the younger generation of folks
become officers, they're bringing in that that same mindset. We're also seeing kind of at the
other end of the spectrum officers that are nearing retirement, that have, you know,
anecdotally expressed wanting to reset, wanting to kind of get back to who they were before
their 15, 20, 25 years on the job. So they're wanting to try to start taking care of their
mental health so that they can have a successful retirement. So certainly there are, you know,
some of the mid career folks that maybe might be a little bit less receptive. But we are seeing
kind of, you know, on the tail ends, the newer officers and then those that are getting ready
to retire that are becoming more open to at least having the discussion surrounding mental health.
Okay, great. The second study, this was this was different, if I remember,
you didn't do a survey, you interviewed sworn officers and some personnel, which I think is
excellent. And you wanted to understand their perceptions about the current state of mental
health in law enforcement, or at least in their agency. And the response that obviously jumped
out to me in the research, you used it in the article's title was, it's a hot dumpster fire
mess. Now, what else can you tell us about that study? Yeah, so that one was a really,
really interesting piece, came from my postdoctoral fellowship. And what we did here was we asked
officers, well, we asked personnel, right, because we did include some of our some of our
civilian support staff. So we asked personnel members, if they could describe the current state
of mental health and policing in four words, what four words would they choose? And the idea here
was to get just really quick, like right off, you know, right off the cusp, answers. And then we also
asked them, if you could venture a guess into what some of your colleagues might think, how do you
think they might answer that question? And the goal there was to get at some of those injunctive
social norms, right? If we understand how people think their peers think, it can give us a glimpse
into what they think. So when we, you know, ask them about their own personal perspectives, they
gave a good variety of answers, some negatively valued, some positive. So examples include like
improving or changing or better. And then some negative examples were like taboo, non-existent,
horrific, right? So just obviously, you know, very, very different views there. But when we
asked them what their colleagues thought, they gave much more of a dialogue. So I think it was
more difficult for them to nail down individual words for what they thought their peers might
might believe. But they had discussions surrounding, you know, these generational
differences that I was just mentioning. You know, some individuals viewed the newer officers as
being soft and not quite cut out for the job. And some of the older officers, again, kind of on the
other end of the spectrum, were like, you know, we just are more accepting of it now than we used to
be. So there was a lot of variety, but it gave some really, really interesting insight into
what everybody thought their peers thought. So that was a really interesting piece.
The idea of older, more experienced officers, I think that tends to be
a similar theme. You get these older officers, they're beyond, they're getting close to
retirement. They're mellowed. They're not going to be chasing people down. They're going to let
the younger people go crazy. You'll get it out of your system and we'll be fine.
So you've mentioned a few things that lead me to this particular question about studying multiple
agencies. Because as I said, there are so many different, you know, large agencies, small
agencies. Is there any expanded research in this area of police stress across this nation or any
others? Not to my knowledge. Effectively, most of these studies have been, most of the research
has been case studies, right? So studying one department, looking at what they do, and then
moving on to another department. And certainly all very important work, right? This is the, you know,
all of my work has been single agencies at a time. But it does make it difficult to compare across
agencies unless you're taking the exact same standardized tools from agency to agency. And
then you can start making comparisons. But there's just such a vast difference in available resources
and funding between like rural departments that have 10 or less officers and, you know, departments
in the Northeast that have 30,000 officers. So what that looks like is just going to be so different.
And it's not to say that any of those studies are wrong, right? All of this is so unique and so
subjective to what that agency needs. That looking at them one at a time as a way to help improve
that individual agency is still going to be extremely valuable. Oh, no, there's no doubt that
everybody that learns about, you know, getting into a PhD program, you study an agency that's
locally or whatever it might be, that's fine. And we all get that as academics. But because
there are so many different agencies, you're right, you can't compare one to the other. But
even then, getting a larger sample from different perspectives, giving us the ability to not compare,
but to describe what's going on out in the field. So if you had, you know, a national level sample,
and this is my suggestion to you, this could make your career, right? Studying this, doing
research nationwide. So if any of our listeners are with the IACP, police futures institution,
Southern Police Institute, National Police Institute, whatever, get a hold of Dr. Padilla,
because I'm sure she'd be able to be on board to put together a study that could then, getting back
to seriousness of this, be able to describe what's going on in the field. The larger agencies,
you're right, it's probably not going to tell us too much different than what we would expect.
Larger agencies have the resources. But still, it would be able to tell us, are any of these,
you know, changing the terms that they're calling their mental health checkups? Instead of visiting
a psychologist, you're seeing the doctor for a checkup. And maybe we're seeing this being used
in the academies. I'm of the opinion that, you know, relearning something down the line that you
didn't learn in the academy is going to be different. So if we could even give an hour or two
in the academy training to the discussion of mental health and being open to it,
I think that would be a great idea. So it's too bad there's not a lot more. But
it opens up all kinds of opportunities for somebody like yourself.
Absolutely. And I haven't published anything on it just yet, but in collaboration with the
Alert Center here at Texas State with the fantastic Pete Blair, I did do a kind of small pilot,
um, somewhat representative across the country survey, just like a general census to see,
you know, what does your agency offer? And then I asked the same willingness to accept
or willingness to access questions. So I got about 500 responses there from officers across
a variety of states. So, you know, I can start to get into that a little bit. And then the goal
there is to use this data to apply for some national level funding to really exactly,
as you mentioned, really get a good understanding of what agencies across the board are doing
and seeing if, you know, if we can help build a resource or some sort of, you know,
repository or something just to give this information to agencies that might be interested.
You said earlier, I was making some notes here. You talked about overtime as being part of stress.
Now, is this working too much overtime? Is that the problem?
Um, so for, uh, for overtime, it tends to be, uh, maybe like an inability to access overtime.
So the way that a lot of agencies, um, obviously you're, you're, you're familiar with it from,
from your, from your side. Um, the way that a lot of agencies work is when
overtime opportunities are available, they are gone based on a seniority system. So, um,
the more senior officers get first dibs and then, you know, down the line. Um, so younger officers,
officers who maybe are in a less financially stable situation may not have as many opportunities
for overtime. If those overtime opportunities are being, um, kind of snatched up by the more
senior folks. Um, but then on the other side of that, you know, we are understaffed pretty
severely across the country. So there is forced and mandated overtime, right? Or it might be
impacting officer's ability to sleep, um, impacting their home life if they're not, you know,
home for their normal night, nighttime routine that they, you know, might normally engage in.
So it, it disrupts their life. Um, the forced overtime and then the inability to get overtime
can impact them financially. You know, that's interesting. You say it that way because, uh,
I talk with different police officers and police agencies up, up in this part of the country
and they've been actually having problems getting the officers to take the overtime.
Yeah. Um, that, and it's not because they're overly stressed because they've got too much.
It's the, they are typically the comment is these are the younger officers. They have a different
perspective on the work life balance. Yes. Yes. And so, you know, they say, no, I'm, I'm cool.
I don't need the overtime. You know, life is good. I'm making decent, decent salary. I don't have to
worry about, which then causes some stress for the, for the administration because he can't
fill the positions that they, uh, the, the positions that they need to take care of during
a particular shift. Absolutely. Yeah. The, the generational differences are, um, are interesting
to see happen in real time. Yeah. The younger generation, the newer, the newer, uh, cadets and
officers definitely have a much different take on work life balance than officers before them.
Yeah, certainly. So, okay. Uh, let's, let's wrap it up. We've had a great conversation.
Again, I, I'm glad you were here for this. Um, normally what I do, and I'm going to ask you
the same thing. Can you identify two, maybe three implications for police practice, uh, police
leaders when it comes to, uh, when it comes to mental health? Yeah. So the first, uh, would be,
um, we need buy-in and engagement from all levels. So, uh, we need our, you know,
mid-level supervisors and above all the way up even to the chief, um, to be modeling this type
of behavior, right? Attending, uh, trainings with your, um, with your line officers, with your
sergeants, everybody like that. But then also, yeah, modeling this behavior, acknowledging,
you know, when you might be struggling a little bit, willingly talking about seeking out, um,
services when, you know, when it's realistic and possible, but really just working to kind of
create that culture where it's okay for your younger officers or your more senior officers
or everyone in between, um, to admit that they might need a little extra help. Uh, and I think
that that will start to, to reduce some of that stigmatization a little bit. Um, and then the
second thing would be, um, kind of at a broader agency level would be to include our support staff
in all of these, um, services as well, right? Our dispatchers, our, um, crime scene techs,
crime analysts, everything like that. They get exposed to a lot of the same content as our,
you know, officers in the field do. Um, but they're, they're sometimes left out of the wellness
aspect of it. So they don't always get the debriefings. They don't always get closure of
knowing how cases, you know, end up. Uh, so it can be a little frustrating. Um, I would imagine
not being able to access some of those same resources. So, you know, be inclusive with your,
with your support staff and then be engaged as a leader.
That's great information and, you know, great suggestions for the police when it comes to
helping their officers with stress and mental health. Uh, Dr. Padilla again,
I really appreciate your time. This has been very illuminating.
Absolutely. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Have a great day. Take care.
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