POLICING needs to gain a better understanding of mental health illnesses so colleagues and supervisors can direct people to the help that\u2019s available for them.<\/p>\n
More than a million days of police officers’ time have been lost over the past three years because of mental health issues, figures obtained by ITV News shows. Steve Taylor, Chairman of Essex Police Federation, said help for officers was currently \u201csporadic\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are starting to understand more and more the impact that poor mental health has on officers and I think we\u2019re becoming better at diagnosing it,\u201d said Steve.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have in place some really useful and powerful ways of improving mental health. But unfortunately it\u2019s sporadic. In some parts of the force we have really clued up supervisors that signpost, get help to them who need it.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut in others maybe we\u2019re missing some of those signs because some of our colleagues don\u2019t get that platinum service that other people in the force do. For me, it\u2019s just about signposting at the early stages for our colleagues to get that right kind of help.<\/p>\n
\u201cPerhaps one of the ways that we can practically improve that is by all of us having that big conversation. Mental health isn\u2019t a dirty phrase, and colleagues that suffer with mental health aren\u2019t to be avoided or shunned simply because we don\u2019t understand.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have to make it our business to understand so that we can help identify and then signpost people to the help that\u2019s available for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
POLICING needs to gain a better understanding of mental health illnesses so colleagues and supervisors can direct people to the help that\u2019s available for them. More than a million days\u2026 read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3258,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3257"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3260,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3257\/revisions\/3260"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/essexfedfocus.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}