Awareness

Firefighter Behavioral health Alliance

57.6% of fire fighters report having experienced a major Morally Injurious Event, like injured children or evidence of abuse
49.8% admitted to feeling emotionally detached and isolated, long recognized as a mental-health stressor
From 2014-2020, more fire fighters died by suicide than in the line of duty

Resilience

What is resilience?

Resilience is the capacity not just to recover quickly from setbacks but to grow as a result of having worked through them
Rather than bouncing back to the point at which the setback occurred, you are able to bound ahead to a higher level
Resilience is a skill, which means it can be learned and improved with practice. Humans are by naturally resilient beings

Five aspects of resilience

Physical: enables you to recover quickly from exhaustion and illness

Mental: allows you to assimilate information quickly, see multiple points of view, and focus on what’s essential

Emotional: enables you to remain calm under pressure

Social: helps you to overcome resistance and to ask for and accept help

Spiritual: brightens your life and inspires others

How can you encourage and support resilience in yourself and others?

Short-term

Engage in positive self-talk

Take one step today to take care of a physical, emotional, or mental need

Find the opportunity in the problem or challenge, and focus on it

Ask for help when you need it; don’t wait

Long-term

Develop strong social support systems

Engage in positive self-talk

Develop and implement a plan to strengthen the five aspects of resilience listed above

Take care of your physical, emotional, and mental needs

Develop the mindset that you always get to choose how you experience setbacks

Apply the skills of emotional intelligence

Proactively ask for help and then accept it

PTS vs PTSD

PTS/Acute Stress Disorder/ Post Traumatic Stress Injury

PTS is a normal response to a traumatic event
Symptoms will typically subside after time, and treatment is optional in this case
In short, it is a response to a real or perceived threat

PTSD

Moral Injury

Moral Injury is the damage done to one’s conscience or moral compass when that person perpetrates, witnesses, or fails to prevent acts that transgress one’s own moral beliefs, values, or ethical codes of conduct.
Moral Injury refers to experiences/situations that go against an individual’s internal moral compass such as lack of fairness or the inability to do what is right and just.
57.6% of study participants reported having experienced a morally-injurious event such as mass shootings, car accidents, injured children, evidence of abuse, or their own failure to call out colleagues making mistakes on the job.

In a nutshell, when someone experiences a traumatic event, their brain gets stuck in the fight/flight/freeze response.
The problem for people who experience trauma is that their brains, particularly in the amygdala where this occurs, cannot turn off this response.

Prefrontal cortex

Front portion of the brain, is known as the gatekeeper of information.
Its job, among other things, is to filter information and deem it either necessary or frivolous and act accordingly.
In people who have PTSD there is a disconnect between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. They simply aren’t communicating appropriately.
So, they are stuck in this state of readiness even when the threat is averted.
The results are a bevy of symptoms that are the hallmarks of PTSD.

Mental Health struggles can manifest in different ways.