The Moral Injury of Police Work

A police officer’s mental health can be impacted by more than just the personal and physical trauma they experience on the street.  Moral injuries are less tangible but similarly harmful events that can contribute to psychological and depressive disorders.  Dr. Lorraine Smith-MacDonald explains moral injuries and how they can impact police officers.

Main Topics

• Moral injuries are the psychological, emotional, or spiritual pain resulting from exposure to one or more events involving the transgression or violation of deeply held morals, ethics, or values.
• The research uncovered several “themes” to understand how officers experience moral injuries.
• While most themes related to street-level experiences, officers can experience moral injury from within the organization itself. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

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 the myths of police officer behavior. I'm your host, Scott Phillips. In a prior episode, I discussed the accessibility of mental health programs for police officers. So when I stumbled into a paper titled, It's All Just Part of the Job: An Exploration of Moral Injury in Police Officers, Sheriffs, and Public Safety Communicators in Canada, I had to read more about it. The paper began with a brief discussion of the stress related to policing, such as traumatic events and complex work environments. These issues can lead to PTSD and a burnout. Typically, people think about dead bodies or abused children as the type of traumatic event that most impact police officers. That was the point of the earlier podcast, getting officers access to mental health programs because of those events. But the idea of moral injury is different, and it seems to focus on a specific aspect of the occupational stress of law enforcement that is less tangible than the blood and guts of a shooting or traffic accident. So I'm really happy to be joined by Dr. Lorraine Smith MacDonald. Lorraine is an assistant professor and co-chair in the Department of Psychotherapy and Spirituality at St. Stephen's College at the University of Alberta. She has spent more than a decade researching moral injury across military, veteran, firefighter, paramedic, and police populations. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

I'm really excited to do this with you, Scott. Well, great.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Now, as I as I reviewed your work uh and your research history, it was clear that you came from a non-law enforcement background. Now, the benefit of this from my perspective is that it provides you with a different perspective on what might be studied in the police world. I believe that often police researchers can get stuck in a rut and not think more broadly about this occupation when they've been studying it for so long. Can you give us an idea of what drove you in the direction of public safety, occupational stress? It's uh something you could study.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Yeah, for sure. Um, and yes, I do want to acknowledge that I am not law enforcement. The closest thing I got to was being a nanny, actually, for a police detective in Toronto. So that's as far as I get in terms of law enforcement.

SPEAKER_00 2:39

Oh, that's perfectly fine, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:41

Okay, wonderful. Um, I do have uh a soft spot for first responders. I always have. Um, my sister is also a firefighter. Um, and so, you know, I think I was always interested in this population. I had spent most of my time working with military and veteran up to this point. And so when I was studying moral injury, there was this real curiosity for me about does this phenomenon have an effect for this population? And so it the study that that we've done, or the couple of studies that we've done, um, are really coming from a place of not knowing. You know, there there wasn't a lot of research, particularly on in Canadian or North American contexts. Most of them were Australian or European. Um, and we know that the context matters of the law enforcement uh community. And so we really had not much to go on. And so the first study that we were going to talk about today was really a place of saying we don't know if moral injury is relevant or not. And so we did this qualitative study to try and determine that.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Okay, so that leads me directly to the next question. Why is this area of inquiry the moral injury idea of relevance or um value to the police world?

SPEAKER_01 3:55

Yeah, that's a great question. I think we're still figuring that out, Scott. So I don't want to say that we've nailed it and we know exactly why it's important. But what I can say is that when we look at the studies, particularly with military veteran and health care providers, moral injury plays a big part in mental health, burnout, and job retention. Uh, there was a wonderful study, systematic review done by Hall et al. in 2021, which looked at all of the studies on moral injury and mental health. And what was most surprising of the results was that all of the studies showed a positive correlation to things like PTSD, major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, substance use, and particularly suicide. And so when we look at that as a study across all of the studies across the world, I think we need to take it very seriously, right? We need to really honor this. Um, and so we actually just did a study as well with firefighters in Canada, and we found very similar results. Um, an association between moral injury and PTSD, a general anxiety disorder, pardon me, major depressive disorder, and suicide. There was, as I was describing, there's been a couple of studies, finished studies, and they also found results. So one finished study found that police officers uh who experienced compassion fatigue were more likely to experience moral injury and PTSD, and that these were associated with the re-experiencing avoidance and hyper-arousal clusters of PTSD. So there's some really good evidence that moral injury really matters when we talk about mental health in these high-risk populations.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Right. And policing, the the more I'm listening to you and the conversation I had in the other podcast about PTSD and mental health access, it it's you know, I think we all realize it, but it really hits you in the f in the face pretty hard that this is not a healthy occupation in so many ways. So as I said during the introduction, law enforcement, obviously it can be stressful. And I should mention also that it's it's not always a roller coaster ride that people think it is. There have been, and I've experienced these myself, some some really funny events when a cop is out on the street. Still, the idea of moral injury is something I I had never heard of, never considered when it comes to police stress. Can you give us an idea of the specifics of moral injury and its relationship to the occupational stress that might lead to PTSD or burnout? So kind of like what is moral injury and when it's different from other things?

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a great question because I think there's a lot of confusion between moral injury and PTSD and other concepts that I think we're going to get into, Scott. But I think the first thing is to really distinguish that there's really two main types of events that we have been able to study that may be relevant to law enforcement. The first one's called potentially psychologically traumatic events or PPTEs. And these are events that have the potential to cause psychological trauma because they involve actual or you know threat of death, serious injury, violence, or just overwhelming distress in the face of what we would sort of classically think of in terms of traumatic events. Okay, right. And we recognize that they're potentially psychologically traumatic because just because you go to this event doesn't translate to you're gonna automatically get something like PTS or PTSD, right? You're you're not gonna just magically get that. It really depends on all of these sort of psychosocial, independent, environmental, social, organizational factors coming together, whether or not you're gonna receive uh sort of experience some form of diagnosis or not. The second thing that is more relevant to moral injuries are what we call PME's or potentially morally injurious events. Okay. So PME's are characterized those. So, and I think this is gonna really show you the difference by things like acting, failing to act, being the victim of, or witnessing acts that transgress one's morals, beliefs, values, and expectations with serious or real or potential consequences. So a bit of a mouthful, but really what we're talking about is events that transgress those deeply held morals, beliefs, and values.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

Right. So is it it's less tangible, sure, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

Absolutely, absolutely. And so I think what's important is that PMEs can be more less, as you said, less tangible. They're broader. Um, they're really about this more human side of law enforcement. And so what can get tricky is you can have a PPTE and a PME happening at the same time, right? So, for example, you can go to a car accident where a family's maybe been killed, but the driver was drunk, right? This is something that has come up in an interview with us. And that experience of this was not only objectively wrong, in the sense that you know a family shouldn't be killed, but also morally wrong that this person is going to um this person, you know, did it in such a way that was just morally problematic. I think we can all agree, you know, driving and drinking are never a good combination to go home with. And then in this one case, particularly, this gentleman also then found out that the drunk driver got off and was not significantly punished. And so for them, this was just this compounding both traumatic event, but then also very morally injurious event that not only did they have to go through this experience of seeing the trauma of the death, but then also this moral experience of this should never have happened, and worse, this person then was not appropriately punished or or justice was not served. So I just offer that as an example of where the two can get really combined and really messy in terms of those two types of events. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Yeah. Does that answer the question? Yeah, it I think I think it does. Uh you also did mention there, and this is something you have written about in the paper, the idea of uh defining a moral injury to include transgressions of deeply held moral beliefs. Um, where do those other transgressions uh where do they come from? Um and are they just a violent or uh uh or a moral offensive thing? And I guess my question as I was reading it is you know, if if I saw a police officer doing something that was morally offensive, and could that contribute to a moral injury for for another officer?

SPEAKER_01 10:19

Again, really great question. I think what's important to recognize again is just like we talked about sort of a difference between a PPTE and a PME. Um there's also this notion within moral injury literature, again, this is an ongoing thing. We're still evolving, we're still finding our feet with this construct. But in general, we would say that there's really two streams where you can become injured. One is very much about your own personal moral responsibility. So I did something wrong or I didn't do something right, right? So that kind of both commission and omission, I I did something wrong, or I wasn't able to do what I wanted to do in the face of something. But I think what's also really interesting is there's been this expansion of the idea that it can also be about the other. And so when we talk about things that, you know, they did something bad or failed to do something right. And what's really interesting is in our research with first responders and military and veteran populations, but these kind of high-risk populations, is that sometimes it's not only what I did. It's often more problematic with what I couldn't do, right? So I wasn't able to act in the way that I wanted to act. I wasn't able to be morally congruent, right? Like I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn't do it for whatever reason. Or what can also be equally problematic is this idea of being exposed to other people's actions. So, you know, we can talk about in military and veteran very extreme examples, of course, you know, of um war, um, conflict, you know, torture, uh, seeing civilians being uh put in the, you know, put forward in terms of being human shields. But I think when we talk about law enforcement, there's still those same kinds of events that can happen. And so we're gonna talk a little bit about, I hope, we're gonna get into this idea of like also occupational or organizational mistrust, right? And so it can be only externally, like they, the public, did something horrific. But unfortunately, we know that people do experience um kind of a type of sort of moral betrayal, if we could call it that, within organizations, within units, within partnerships, right? That people can start to experience and witness that othering, if we could call it that, um, of moral injury. So absolutely, I think it's very possible that it doesn't have to always just be what I did. Though again, what we know is that sometimes it's more the what I couldn't do, right? That gets really sticky, but also what they did can also become really problematic for many people.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Okay, great. Okay, that that clears things up for me. Well, at least a little bit for me, but it's not just something that I see that okay, I didn't do or I could have done, or I saw somebody could because this this is something that is a current event that police officers across the country are seeing other officers. There's so many video cameras out there or cell phone cameras that are collecting video that that find, you know, uh obviously accidental, but sometimes it'd be like that kind of just shouldn't have done that. And I've had conversations with people that they're actually saying that. Okay, so you've given us a lot of information. What what is your what was your basic research question and how did you go about collecting data to answer that question?

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Mm-hmm. As I said at the beginning of the the top of the interview, we really came to this point of curiosity. So the question was really simple. It was simply does moral injury matter and impact law enforcement personnel and public safety communicators? And if it does, in what ways? So we were really trying to understand the phenomenon. Like, what is this thing? Is it a thing? If it is, how does it impact the lived experience of our participants? So we did a combination of focus groups and interviews. We started off with focus groups and found that to be really helpful. But people also wanted to go more in depth to speak with us. And so we ended up following up and doing interviews with in a total of 19 participants, which doesn't sound like a lot, but for qualitative research, that's very normal. It's not huge numbers. We're not talking about hundreds of thousands of people in a survey. Right. Um, and we talked to them for roughly between 60 and 90 minutes. So you can imagine um, you know, we would have 40, 50 pages of transcript by the time we would be coding and doing that. Um, the officers were predominantly male. Um, we did try to have uh include more female-oriented officers, but you know, the population divide was such that it was predominantly male. Um but we really took the time to do what we called a thematic analysis or a reflexive thematic analysis, which was really focused on trying to understand, as I said, what is this thing? Right. And we recognized that we already had some of my own uh as a lead, I had my own ideas, and so I was working really hard to bracket those ideas and say, let's go in is to them to the best of our ability with a clean slate. Let's just be curious. Um, and so we did the analysis, and I think we're gonna talk about the results in a moment, but that's kind of how it came to be. So, really a place of not knowing, as I said, there were when we did our study, there were no studies looking at moral injury in a North American context.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Which which I really I appreciate from a personal perspective because as I went through uh the the um the the the graduate school and somebody once told me, do what you have to do in order to do what you want to do. And the first thing is you have to get tenure and all those kinds of fun things. But then it got to a point where it was I was at an age where I don't have to do anything I don't want to do. Here's what I want to study on some a couple of things that were completely different, and I just had so much fun exploring those, which were hugely in fact one of the one of the topics I study not that I've been cited a lot of times, but one of them that was just a goof, like I wonder what's you know, what cops do when they're bored. It's been cited like the the third third or fourth most popular citation I've ever had. So curiosity is a great thing, don't get me wrong. But I do want to dive into your your findings now. But before we get into a deeper discussion, one of your findings, which you you can hit a couple of different themes, my friend. I know you want to you want to talk about relating to moral injury. You found you found, and and I'm gonna quote this it's all just a part of the job theme, which is part of the title. And then you wrote, and this I think is really, really important, but I want clarification on this too. This phrase functioned paradoxically as a protective normalization and a barrier to recognition of moral injury. Can you explain that for the listeners? Why was it a paradox that, hey, it's just part of the job?

SPEAKER_01 16:52

Yeah, and I love this. Somebody said this as an offhand quote to me, and I was like, this is the theme, this is the heart of the paper, right here in this one offhand quote. I think what we mean by this, Scott, is people presumed that they couldn't be injured on the job, and yet at the same point they were going to be injured on the job. Okay. So how this worked with moral injury was it was sort of like, of course, we're gonna see all kinds of horrible, morally injurious events, and that's not gonna affect us. And then at the same point, when we got deeper into the interviews, it started to come out, of course we're affected. How could we not be affected? What's wrong with you? Why would you think we wouldn't be affected? And so there was this tension, this paradox of sort of, you know, it's all part of the job. I'm not gonna be injured, and I am gonna be injured. And it put participants in this really awkward place of how am I supposed to do my job when I recognize that I'm probably gonna be injured in some ways, but the expectation is that I keep going, right? That I I don't be injured. And so this was this was just the theme that came up, and we thought this summarizes moral injury in a nutshell for us of what it is that participants had to live through.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

Yeah, it's interesting. Okay, so once you get past the it's part of the job theme, what were the other moral injury themes that uh you and your team uncovered?

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Yeah, I think I'm gonna focus on a couple just for time's sake. Um, the first one was that moral injury was really deemed unseen suffering. And there was this quote that I'll just read to you. This gentleman said to me, just because it's not horrifying doesn't mean it's not injurious.

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

And again, I think that spoke to me that just because it's not a PPTE and in the flashy sense that we think about it, it doesn't mean that it's not injurious, right? There's something that deep down inside. And so what we found was that people started to change their personality, their moral beliefs and values, and that there was a chronicity of this kind of darker side of human behavior. And so there was this sense of like altered worldview. So one of the consequences, and I'll describe that in a moment, of this unseen suffering was what we termed altered worldview and becoming dispirited. So the altered worldview was really around things like bitterness, jadedness, cynicalness, dark humor, hardened hardening yourself, right? Like nothing is going to impact me anymore. I've seen too much, and a loss of goodness. So this view of the world is terrible, people are terrible, and I'm I can't even see the goodness in the world anymore. I've completely lost it.

SPEAKER_00 19:39

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 19:40

And becoming dispirited was like a more extreme form of that, which was the impact of health and well-being. People talked about feeling burnt out, worn down, experiencing feelings like numbness and anger. And most amazingly, people also talked about feeling really broken by their morally injurious experiences, that they hadn't been able to reconcile these experiences, um, both personally, professionally, organizationally, that these things just kind of really haunted them. In terms of the peenies that we found that were most problematic for police officers, particularly, were four. The first was what we called the court of public opinion. So many police officers found, especially in today's very um heightened, potentially um conflictual society, that they were constantly under pressure and often being judged, morally judged, felt very personal in the critiques and criticisms that they were experiencing.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

Sure, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

They also experienced what we called imperfect systems, which was really the fact that, particularly law enforcement, when something goes wrong and people don't know what to do, what's the first thing to do? They call 911, and the first people to show up are the police, usually, right? Especially in a more difficult scene. And so they came to recognize that you know they're constantly being put in these situations where often the need of the situation outstrips their own capacity. Like, what am I supposed to do? Right? Like, how am I supposed to respond to this? And yet again, that requirement, kind of going back to that meta theme of it's all just part of the job, is like, no, you show up and you figure it out, you get it done, it doesn't matter, right? You just do it. And in particular for police, the issue of justice and working within the justice system was deemed to be really morally challenging. So feeling like they had done their very best to protect the public, and then feeling like, again, going back to that example I gave you with the drunk driver, realizing that you know justice was never served. I'll also just highlight the last two because I think they are important for police officers to recognize and law enforcement personnel and more generally. We call some we called this third theme the underbelly of society, because this is a direct quote from one of our participants who said police especially. But also public safety communicators, because they are the first to get that 911 call, really experience the underbelly of society. Um, and this gentleman went on to share some pretty horrific stories, and I won't share those for the sake of your uh uh listeners because they don't think that's appropriate. But he talked about basically just seeing what we would term in very colloquial sense, evil, right? And I you can't your listeners can't see me. I'm putting my fingers in the air, bunny quotes here. But I think we can't, we should talk about this as being really problematic for many police officers and first responders in general, which is what do you do when something is so morally horrific to you, right? Like what do you do? How do you respond? Right, and again, being that first in the door really seemed to impact. This was a unique theme that we didn't really hear across um fire and paramedics. This seemed to be a really big theme for law enforcement personnel. So the very last theme.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

So you I pardon me for interrupting. So you you really didn't see that particular theme very often in the other in the other you know professions?

SPEAKER_01 23:12

Not to the same degree, no. This this seemed the thing that police really focused on in their discussions with us. Um, this real sense of hyper awareness of the deep, dark side of humanity. That's not to say that other first responders don't experience that. And I really want to make that clear. Right. I'm just saying it was an interesting result for us that it came very strongly through the stories that we were told by the law enforcement personnel.

SPEAKER_00 23:46

Yeah, that's that's that's something that um in some of the other research that that I've read over the over the years, there's an aspect of the the average you know person doesn't see too much bad in their life. But police officers they see it in i in fre frequently, and again, depending on where they're working frequently. And then they tend to remember the worst of those worst stories or or events that they're exposed to, which is you know something I used to have to teach in class that you know you know uh mo most of us in here some of them did, they came from you know rough neighborhoods, but most of us don't experience those kinds of things, so the officers do, and then and that's all the kind of experience. Nobody calls the police just to have milk and cookies. People call the police because they need some sort of help and there's some sort of tragic events, and so when they show up, you just said it yourself also, they're the first one in the door, and then people expect them to know what to do. So that that you know, I can see the compounding stress in those kinds of things. Okay, I I apologize. You you had at least one more theme?

SPEAKER_01 24:45

The very very last theme I promise, and then we can move on, is what we called organizational mistrust. And I think this is an important theme to talk about as well. This theme is cross-cutting across all of the populations that I've worked with military veteran, first responders, um, you know, um, paramedics, fire. And I think this theme really speaks to, as as it's sort of the name sort of implies, like that sense of do people have my back? Is my organization living out their own moral values and codes? Right. Like if we say we're here to serve and protect, am I getting that same reciprocation in my own organization? Am I being protected? Am I being honored? Is my are my sacrifices being heard and supported and all of those types of things? And, you know, it seems like, again, this is a particular form of moral injury that's very problematic across these populations. Because I think as an as an outsider looking in, I recognize that there's so much focus on, you know, this is part of your family, right? You trust each other implicitly, you have to trust each other implicitly. You put your lives kind of on the line, and you need to have that cohesion. And so I recognize that as an outsider, but I think what I also see as an outsider is that when those cracks start to occur in the organization, it has a tremendous impact on people. And it's something that I think needs to be recognized as well.

SPEAKER_00 26:16

Right. And and I didn't plan it this way, but just two weeks ago, one of the um uh conversations I had had to do with organizational justice, which is exactly what you're talking about. You know, d does this agency have my back? Uh again, uh assuming it's a good faith error on the part of the officer, or it even if it just looks bad, if it's a you know if it's a a good thing the officer is doing, yeah. I can see I can actually see how that could be one of those things that you know morally as a moral injury, not just a you know an offensive kind of thing that uh I'm pissed at my sergeant because he kind of hung me out to dry. I can see that. Yeah, I I I do want to reference back. I did you talk about did you talk about um oh my notes here? Where is it? Uh unseen suffering.

SPEAKER_01 27:00

Yeah, again, that's just that that unseen suffering was really about how moral injury presented itself. Like, you know, we had this wonderful quote by a participant who said, you know, I no one ever told me or I've never heard of this term, but it resonates like really, really, really well for me, was his quote to me. And I think, you know, because moral injury is not as flashy often as you know, PPTEs or PMEs are not as flashy, they're like hidden. They're like this this unseen suffering, right? Someone once said to me as a definition, and I hope this maybe helps your listeners moral injury was what happened to my humanity in the face of so much inhumanity. And this was a direct call from a veteran participant in one of our studies, and it's always resonated with me.

SPEAKER_00 27:50

Yeah, when I when I was reading that, um it one of the respondents respondents, I noted this. He said that it felt that they were not psychologically prepared to handle the challenges they experienced in their careers. And the the way I interpreted that, it was almost as if he was saying, Look, you can show me all the pictures of dead people you want. I'm not gonna understand it as clearly until I see it on the street. Is is that is that accurate?

SPEAKER_01 28:18

Yeah, I think I think definitely. I think people would also just say that even their training, and this is something we found in paramedics and first responders, you know, their training sort of skipped over these moral components. And I think the last thing that I really want your listeners to understand is like PMEs and moral injury, they're real, right? I know that they're not well known. We're only beginning to wrap our heads around this. But I think the evidence that we have is stronger and stronger and stronger that these are real events and they have real consequence for people. And so in our discussion with people around this topic, there was this sense of absolutely, I did not know what I was getting into until I was knee deep in the trenches and so on. But I also think there was this feeling of nobody really talked about this piece, right? We we really talked a lot about, you know, trauma, trauma pieces, what that might look like. But again, particularly linking this back to that theme of the underbelly of society. Like, what do I do when I've witnessed something that's so horrific, I can never forget it, right? And again, it has this moral flavor to it. So I think this is something that's really important. Um, and so in terms of recommendations, I I know you haven't asked me for these, but I'm gonna give them anyway.

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Timing is perfect. Go over ahead.

SPEAKER_01 29:38

Okay, yeah. Um, is really I think a couple of pieces. Again, the first one is just that recognition piece. And I hope for your listeners, um, our little conversation today gives language to maybe perhaps parts of their experience that they haven't always been able to articulate clearly. So I think the first one, the second one I'd like to honor for uh law enforcement personnel is you are going to be exposed to these messy, inhumane, morally gray, ambiguous situations. And that is kind of normal and it has nothing to do with you in the sense of that. The second thing is I really think, or sorry, I should say the third thing is that we really need, I would really encourage all of your listeners to really take stock of who are they, what do they believe in, right? And how has work impacted them? Because one of the things that we found was that many people experienced what we called the erosion of self, who they are when they started the program. You know, they they were young, and people talked about even being a bit naive and hopeful, and you know, I'm gonna go out there and help people. And I'm always amazed by first responders because you amaze me because I know that that's what you want to do. Every single first responder I've spoken to talked about that desire at the very beginning. What happens though, I think, over time when you're exposed to both traumatic and morally injurious events is that that starts to erode who you are, right? It really erodes your sense of self. And someone even talked about eroding their sense of their soul, right? Like that they had really experienced this deep woundedness. And so I would really encourage your listeners to take stock of that. You know, where am I on that scale? Am I noticing that I'm becoming more bitter and jaded and, you know, angry, right? That I've lost that sense of goodness, then that might be an indication that not that you are experiencing a moral injury. Again, I'm not diagnosing you by any stretch of the imagination, but it might be signs that something is trans transpiring in you, right? Something is happening to you that maybe you need to look at. And the very last point.

SPEAKER_00 31:49

Okay, answered. Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Yeah, it's just that leadership support. I think it's really important that leaders recognize that their members are going to be exposed to these things and having supports, education, psychological help ready to go. So that when maybe these more problematic PPTEs and PME's mix, right? Because we know they're a wicked combo, right? They're they're really wicked. Um, that leaders have those things in mind and recognizing that this is something their members may be experiencing at the same time. So those are just my really quick reflections.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

Any any plans to extend this research?

SPEAKER_01 32:28

Yeah, we're hoping to actually we have a really interesting resistance proposal in the works, which is really looking at what is the impact of moral injury and other um occupational stress injuries on self. So, really looking at this um from a perspective of that wholeness, like who am I and how does this impact me? We're also looking to replicate this study, hopefully across Canada, because we we were very focused on certain parts of the country. And so we weren't able to get like a national sample, sure, um, which is something we'd really like to do. And the last thing that we're hoping and we're um, you know, fingers crossed, going to be looking at is looking at um exploring what kind of treatment options would be appropriate for first responders, recognizing that we can't just slap a label on every first responder population and be like, here's your pre-cut cookie cutter, you know, approach, right? As I said, there's law enforcement particular themes and flavors that we found in the study that have to be acknowledged and recognized and honored. Um, and so in particular, we're really focused on trying to understand the unique needs of law enforcement and what would you know, treatment or moral resiliency support actually look like for them and not just presume because we kind of have it figured out in military and veteran populations that it's gonna translate over. So those are things we're working on.

SPEAKER_00 33:53

Excellent. Well, I I'd like to say this was a fabulous conversation, but I'm suddenly a little depressed. But but this was this was very informative information. Like I said, I had never heard of the idea of moral injury and its it is its component as a part of policing. This was really great. So I want to thank uh Dr. Lorraine Smith McDonald again. Thank you, Lorraine, for coming on the show. This was good stuff.

SPEAKER_01 34:13

Thank you so much, and all the best to your listeners and my my sincere gratitude for what they do.

SPEAKER_00 34:18

Agreed, thanks, and you have a great day.

SPEAKER_01 34:20

All right, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 34:25

That's it for this episode of the Police in Service Training Podcast. I want to thank you, the listener, for spending your valuable time here. If you like what you've heard, please tell a friend to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever they get their podcasts. And please take a moment to review this podcast. If you have any questions or comments, positive or negative, or if you think I should cover a specific topic, feel free to send me an email, which you can find in the show notes. Or you can find me on Blue Sky using the handle at policeinservice.bsky dot social. Thanks very much and have a great day.