‘Once we find the cause, we can look for a cure’

In this article, Monty Montgomery, Secretary of Essex Police Federation, (pictured) looks at what can be done to help officers suffering from mental illness. Click here/see below for full article.  

A total of 285 officers were signed off through stress, depression, anxiety, stress or post-traumatic stress disorder in the financial year ending March 2015, compared with 276 the year before.

While the numbers number of officers signed off are disturbing, what causes more concern is the way that officers are treated by management.

PTSD, depression, stress and anxiety are all very real illnesses, but they are not visible.

With invisible illnesses, some managers can be a little less sympathetic or understanding about the condition and about how the officer reacts. There is also an organisational stigma in relation to mental illness.

When an officer is suffering from a work-related mental illness, often their symptoms will be exacerbated by unhealthy or thoughtless reminders from work colleagues, or during the sickness management process by managers.

By way of an example, consider an officer who is on long term sick leave due to PTSD brought on by continued exposure to traumatic incidents. The officer has all of the classic PTSD symptoms: hyperarousal, avoidance, phobias and paranoia.

Their manager wants to speak to them as part of attendance management, and tries to ring. The manager believes they are doing the right thing, after all there is a process to be followed, and the officer will understand this and will appreciate the manager popping in for a chat and a cuppa.

But the officer doesn’t answer the phone to the manager, because they don’t want to be reminded of the very thing that caused them to be ill in the first instance.

So the officer avoids contact with the manager to protect their own health. (“I can’t speak to anyone from work.”) The manager then follows process, and records the fact that attempts were made to contact the officer, but they refused to answer the phone. The note on the sickness file might read “officer refusing to engage with managers”.

This is then interpreted as the officer being difficult, and the officer is labelled as such.

Things can then progress to a management meeting where a health professional could make the comment “stop their pay, they’ll soon contact us then”. This is a particularly unhelpful message to send out, and is indicative of a manager’s insensitivity, and ignorance of the underlying problems facing the officer.

Because the officer is on long-term absence, they can be ‘posted’ while on sick leave. Very often this posting is purely an administrative process to allow the force to be able to fill vacancies and to have the right people in the right place. To an officer suffering from PTSD, and the associated paranoia, this can have a huge impact. Not always do managers think to include these officers in the communication loop, so the officer will find out by way of rumour, quite often well after the event. The officer’s paranoia will only be increased and they will feel further isolated.

Sometimes, because of mental illness, officers are so unwell that they will become voluntary patients at a psychiatric ward. It can not be stressed enough how big a step this is for an officer to take. A police officer is used to taking Section 136 patients to these establishments, and is aware of the type of patients who may be here. The officer may find themselves sharing a ward with people that he or she would have taken there. There is a huge stigma attached to becoming a voluntary patient, and officers would have reached rock bottom emotionally and mentally to consider this, and would have reached out to the psychiatric unit for protection and help.

Imagine, then, the difficulty an officer will have when a manager wants to attend the unit to deliver a letter that some process says needs to be delivered. The very organisation that may have contributed to an officer’s mental illness, is now chasing them into their sanctuary to deliver a piece of paper. How safe will that officer feel now? What effect will that have on their short and long-term recovery?

When we, as an organisation, try and deal with an officer suffering from mental illness, we often forget about basic principles. Supervisors and managers only remember the officer as being ‘a big, robust officer’. They can’t see the illness. They can’t see the inner turmoil, the relentless self-doubt or the suspicion. So they often treat the officer as they would have done before sickness.

Officers with mental illness can become suicidal, self-harm, abuse alcohol or drugs and generally engage in a self-destructive pattern of behaviour that seems to an outsider to be totally irrational, but to them will be fine.

If a prisoner was brought before a custody sergeant with the same levels of mental illness that some officers present with, an appropriate adult would be contacted to assist the person with the processes, but the same organisation considers it totally appropriate that an officer suffering debilitating mental illness can speak up for themselves.

Within Essex, we have seen an increase in budget to occupational health department. We have a clear commitment from Chief Officers that we want to be a caring organisation. We have even signed up to the ‘Blue Light’ Programme. But still we have an increase in the number of officers reporting sick with mental illness. We still have a lot of misunderstanding of the problems associated with mental illness.

I was asked recently, what the reason for the increase in stress-related sickness. I can not answer that question, but I am confident that if a stress survey were to be conducted among all the officers, we might be able to find the answer.

Until we find the cause for the sickness, we can only treat the symptoms. Once we find the cause, we can look for a cure.

The quoted examples are all real, and all happened with Essex.