Mental health providers for EMS employees.

[bigbaldguy]

So I knew a guy who went to work every day for 22 years and loaded bags and cargo into airplanes in Phoenix Arizona. For 22 years he never called in sick for a day of work and never had an injury. He did the same job, used probably less "proper lifting technique" and would talk about "pushing through the pain". People all around him would go out on OJI and he would talk about how "I must be unique cuz I've never hurt myself" and "I guess I'm just built differently". The guy wasn't bragging he just didn't think the same rules applied to him. Couple years ago while playing with one of his kids he threw his back out. He hasn't been back to work since. Turns out his back is just shredded from repetitive motion and years of abuse. He's practically a cripple.

There are a lot of parallels between our physical and emotional health.

 

[firetender]

Every call is a stressor.

Because we are in a humanistic field, we witness the whole gamut of debility, whether it be self- or outer-imposed. The world we navigate in is almost completely populated by people in all sorts of varieties of distress. Our one job is to relieve as much of that as possible.

I am aware of professionals who offer their counseling services to medics but they are few, far between and, for the most part, not quite there. The ones who live through the trauma (or like kinds of it) and then work through it are the ones who hold the most effective keys.

IMHO I think clinically trained counselors are valuable back-ups, but I'm a simpleton and believe that we need to take responsibility for ourselves and each other to play a bigger part in the maintenance of our sanity and humanity in the field.

Someone mentioned only knowing EMS suicides who pulled the plug due to family problems. How often do we lose track of the fact that it is most often the layers of protective armor we put on at work that we can't take off when we get home that cause so much of the craziness that leads to complete breakdown?

 

[mycrofft]

I think often the wrong people get into EMS, especially at the volunteer or EMT-B level. It is something they are drawn to as a means to address some need they have for excitement, or to feel in control, or address some trauma they had before (a loved one dying, a near-death experience). These folks are the ones who marshal on and get the mask stuck on their face.

Wanting to get into it to attract the opposite sex (gender) is healthy compared to those. Even a little sadism is fine if it is overlain with training and an interest in doing the job right.

Happens in law enforcement too. I've been worried about some of the officers I served with for twenty years who retired from the department to a house populated by the ghosts of two divorces, estranged grown offspring, and maybe a string of girlfriends or boyfriends seen through a haze of alcohol. So far one died of a MI, no suicides that I know of.

Knock on wood.