New Training Guide to Elevate Suicide Prevention
Efforts within the National Law Enforcement Community
National Partnership Launches Facilitation Guide
Washington, DC, September 15, 2015. At its highest levels, the national law enforcement community acknowledges suicide prevention as a health and safety priority. In 2012 there were 126 documented suicides of police officers (versus 49 killed by gunfire in the line of duty). In 2013 the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) held a forum called "Breaking the Silence: A National Symposium on Law Enforcement Office Suicide and Mental Health," and in 2014 the IACP helped develop a video in partnership with the Carson J Spencer Foundation, the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention, and the American Association of Suicidology entitled Breaking the Silence: Suicide Prevention in Law Enforcement (access video here: https://youtu.be/fBJbo7mnnBs). Today, as part of Suicide Prevention Month, as an expanded collaborative effort, the partnership is releasing a video facilitation training guide for law enforcement agencies. The guide can be downloaded as a free PDF here:
http://carsonjspencer.org/files/9214/4078/2987/20150817_LE_Video_Guide.pdf
"As a law enforcement officer for 30 plus years, the last eight as chief, I recognize the value of sustained, comprehensive and coordinated suicide prevention efforts for in law enforcement agencies. These tools can provide departments with an important first step in opening discussions around the sensitive issue of suicide and mental health," said Kenosha Police Chief John Morrissey, member of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention's Workplace Task Force.
"We must raise awareness that officer mental wellness is part of overall officer fitness. We need to let people know that mental health conditions are not uncommon among police officers and that we need to encourage people to reach out to peer and professional help when they are overwhelmed," said Yost Zakhary, Immediate Past President, International Association of Chiefs of Police. In addition Chief Zakhary serves as an Action Alliance Executive Committee Member and the Public Sector Co-Lead of the Workplace Task Force.
Facts about police officer suicides and mental health
Recognizing the importance of suicide prevention, the facilitation guide and video emphasize that law enforcement organizations must specifically address the needs of their agencies when developing prevention strategies. The tools provide much-needed resources to law enforcement agencies designed to help integrate suicide prevention into overall law enforcement wellness. The facilitation guide and video help start the conversation on suicide prevention and officer wellness. The guide is broken into subsections so that the training can be offered to all those involved in law enforcement: command staff, supervisors, line staff and families.
"We must shift the culture in law enforcement," said Sally Spencer-Thomas, CEO and Co-Founder of the Carson J Spencer Foundation and Private Sector Co-Lead of the Action Alliance's Workplace Task Force. "Opening up a straightforward dialogue about suicide and sharing stories of hope and recovery let officers know they are not alone and that many resources exist."
"Our public servants in law enforcement deserve our utmost care and consideration for their difficult and often dangerous jobs. Their mental health and overall well-being is a concern for all of us. This guide will help the law enforcement work environment become a safer place for those law enforcement officers who are struggling or in distress," said Doryn Chervin, Dr.P.H. Executive Secretary, National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention and Vice President and Senior Scientist at Education Development Center, Inc. Division of Health and Human Development.
"The American Association of Suicidology (AAS) recognizes the important role of workplace-based interventions in the broader suicide prevention mission. Law enforcement professionals are at elevated risk for suicide," said Michelle Cornette Ph.D. Executive Director, American Association of Suicidology. "The Breaking the Silence video and facilitation guide mark an important step in raising awareness and facilitating help-seeking among law enforcement professionals. AAS is proud to be a partner in this important endeavor.
Content development was supported by the Kenosha Police Department, Pennsylvania's Adult/Older Adult Suicide Prevention Coalition, The Badge of Life, Municipal Police Institute and The Law Enforcement Survival Institute.
Breaking the Silence: Suicide Prevention in Law Enforcement:
The American Association of Suicidology (AAS; www.suicidology.org)is a membership organization founded in 1968 for all those involved in suicide prevention and intervention or touched by suicide. AAS leads the advancement of scientific and programmatic efforts in suicide prevention through research, education and training, the development of standards and resources, and survivor support services.
Contact: Michelle Cornette, Executive Director, 202-237-2280, cornette@suicidology.org
The Carson J Spencer Foundation (www.CarsonJSpencer.org) is a Colorado nonprofit, established in 2005. We envision a world where leaders and communities are committed to sustaining a passion for living. We elevate the conversation to make suicide prevention a health and safety priority. We sustain a passion for living by:
Contact: Sally Spencer-Thomas, PsyD, CEO & Co-Founder, 720-244-6535, sally@carsonjspencer.org
International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP)
The IACP is the world's largest association of law enforcement executives. Founded in 1893, the IACP has over 21,000 members in 100 countries around the world. The IACP's mission is to advance professional police services; promote enhanced administrative, technical, and operational police practices; and foster cooperation and the exchange of information and experience among police leaders and police organizations of recognized professional and technical standing throughout the world. Additionally, the IACP champions the recruitment and training of qualified persons in the police profession and encourages all police personnel worldwide to achieve and maintain the highest standards of ethics, integrity, community interaction and professional conduct. For more information on the IACP, please visit http://www.theiacp.org
Contact: Yost Zakhary, Immediate Past President yzakhary@woodwaymail.org
The National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention (www.ActionAllianceforSuicidePrevention.org) is the public-private partnership working to advance the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention and make suicide prevention a national priority. Education Development Center, Inc. (EDC) operates the Secretariat for the Action Alliance, which was launched in 2010 by former U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates with the goal of saving 20,000 lives in five years.
Contact: Eileen Sexton, Director of Communications, 202-572-5383, esexton@edc.org.
In 2012, there were 129 LODD in the US, but also 126 officer suicides, says Badge of Life Program
By Kelsey Bray
March 25, 2013
CHEYENNE, Wyo. - Area officials are hoping that new programs will encourage law enforcement officers to ask for help rather than committing suicide.
In 2012, there were 129 police officer line-of-duty fatalities in the U.S. In that same year, there were 126 police officer suicides, according to the Badge of Life Police Mental Health Program.
"Most officers are aware of the primary danger of policing — bad guys with guns, directing traffic in hazardous conditions," Loveland, Colo. police psychologist Jack Digliani said. "But they do not consider the secondary danger that asking for help is somehow equivalent to being weak."
Digliani, a former Laramie County Sheriff's deputy and Cheyenne Police officer, is promoting an initiative called "Make it Safe" to reduce the number of job-related police suicides.
It recommends several measures to do so, such as educating officers about stress management and the warning signs of suicide, as well as creating peer support groups.
In Laramie County, some of these steps are already in place, Cheyenne Police Sgt. Stephanie Neuman said. She said the police department, sheriff's department and Albany County Sheriff's Office have started peer support groups.
Trained patrol officers are available if employees are having a tough time at work or at home. If officers are uncomfortable talking to someone at their agency, they get help from the two other agencies involved.
"It's an outlet for officers, rather than seeking therapy right away," she said. "They have fellow law enforcement personnel to talk them through something."
And officers have to work through difficult issues, Neuman said, like seeing a dead baby or responding to a fatal crash.
"Maybe you have to decide if you're going to take someone's life that day," she said. "Maybe telling your husband or wife goodbye at breakfast may be the last time you see them."
To help officers with these tough situations, team members get regular training from local therapist Robert Logan.
"I start with the basics of counseling and human behavior," he said. "Then we'll work on counseling skills and how to help people, especially with workplace stress."
Additionally, the agencies will contract with Logan and can refer officers to him, if needed.
Logan said this is a great way to take care of employees.
"I think it's absolutely wonderful that law enforcement is reaching out to the mental health field," he said. "It's a great thing for them to do."
Having a therapist on hand at the Loveland Police Department has been helpful for officers, Chief Luke Hecker said.
He said Digliani's office is constantly full of officers and their families, and his services have improved the health and well-being of the department.
"The culture inside the organization now is one where we embrace his services and recognize the need for them," he said. "There's not a negative stigma to an officer reaching out for help from Jack."
Digliani said he is happy that Laramie and Albany counties are breaking down this stigma, adding that he hopes other departments in the area follow their example.
"My goal is to encourage departments to take active measures and make it safe for officers to ask for help," he said.
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The Wyoming Tribune-Eagle Copyright 2013 Cheyenne Newspapers, Inc.
Following are comments made by Badge of Life founder Andy O'Hara before
the International Association of Chiefs of Police on October 2, 2012.
As Dr. Violanti has alluded to, we have been conducting a study of
police suicides during 2012 that includes all 50 states-the third in a
series we have done on this topic. The purpose of these studies is not
only to determine the number of suicides taking place each year, but to
also develop some kind of meaningful profiles that will tell us what’s
going on out there and help us cut down on some of these losses.
We just received, last night, our suicide figures for October 1, 2012,
and thus far this year there has been a total of 104 police suicides, a
pattern that continues to be entirely too high. Officers continue to
kill themselves at a rate three times that of officers killed by the
gunfire of felons, and more officers are committing suicide than are
dying in the Line of Duty.
SOME HARSH WORDS, PERHAPS--For those departments hiding their suicides
in a closet out of stigma, which we estimate at about 10 to 20 percent
of our suicides, we invite them to take partial credit for the next
police suicide that happens…because that’s exactly what’s happening as
they deprive us of the information we need to formulate effective
programs and cut down on these losses.
It is also time for us to recognize that some of these suicides are duty
related, something we have yet to do on a single occasion. It breaks my
heart—breaks my heart—to see officers who commit some act of heroism,
are traumatized by that same event and develop PTSD and then commit
suicide. They are ignored, buried without honors, and their families are
shunned like pariahs and cast out into the cold. It is time for us to
come into the 21st century on this issue and recognize that some—not all
but some—police suicides should be classified as “in the line of duty.”
NOW—it’s time to talk about the elephant in the room—the fact that,
scattered, we’ve been trying every police suicide prevention program
under the sun for years and suicides remain entirely too high. IF we
hope to have an impact on the number of police suicides in this country,
suicide prevention programs alone are not enough. Instead of just
police suicides, we need to be thinking in terms of mental health for
all police officers.
There’s a big difference between suicide prevention and mental health education.
We need both.
Stop and think about it. The percentage of police officers suffering
from symptoms of PTSD is 15 to 18 percent. Another way of putting it is
that, for every police suicide there are a thousand officers still
working and suffering from the symptoms of post traumatic stress
disorder.
This is just the beginning. On top of this 15 to 18 percent, we have
untold numbers of officers suffering from depression, anxiety, substance
abuse, and much more. In this toxic, caustic profession, there is no
telling how high these numbers finally get, but they illustrate the need
for us to broaden our efforts if we hope to reach the police suicides
that are smack in the middle of them.
What are the benefits of focusing our efforts on mental health? They include not only fewer suicides, but
Fewer lawsuits
Fewer complaints
Less alcoholism
Less sick leave
Fewer accidents
Fewer officers being killed out on the streets.
If you want to save some lives out on the streets, think about how, as I
speak, we have officers with PTSD or other problems on their minds as
they walk up on a car or get ready to knock on a door. Their minds are
not on their jobs, and they are a danger to themselves and to the
officers around them that are depending on them.
So what kind of elaborate, expensive program am I talking about?
The kind of mental health program I’m talking about is a SIMPLE one that
encourages officers to accept responsibility for their own mental
health, in the same way they do their physical health and dental health.
We encourage them to visit a therapist of their choice at least once a
year for what we call a voluntary mental health check. I emphasize the
word “voluntary” because mandating these kinds of programs has been
tried and it doesn’t work. The purpose of this visit is to take a look
at the past year, identify small problems before they become big ones,
see what’s worked and what hasn’t worked, try new things, and develop
their resiliencies—because resiliency development is not a classroom
project—it’s something that needs to take place between the individual
officer and therapist.
For officers who don’t want to accept responsibility for their mental
health, we still have our suicide prevention programs, as a backup, to
catch them when they fall. THE KEY is that instead of just telling
officers to get help when they need it, we need to tell them to get the
help BEFORE they need it.
As Dr. Violanti said, preventive medicine, inoculation are old concepts
in medicine and now mental health and they will continue to apply. We
need to apply them by recognizing that it’s not just about police
suicide—it’s about mental health for all officers.
Full information on this program is available at your fingertips at
BadgeOfLife.com. It’s free, it’s open, take it, plagiarize it, put your
name on it—we don’t care. We only encourage you to review it, consider
implementing it, and begin saving lives in more ways than one. If you
want more—power points, videos, lesson plans, research, just give us a
call or drop us a line and we will get it to you for free within a
couple of days. I want to emphasize that all this is free.
There IS a better way, and that pathway is by creating a safer,
healthier police force, both out on the streets and in their homes.
We can do this if we want to.
After participating in a 45-hour training program in Westminster this
week provided by the National Center for Chaplain Development, the 15
participants will have a better understanding of how to work with
individuals struggling with stress, grief, depression, suicidal
thoughts, post-traumatic stress disorder and a wide array of other life
crises.
Ken Schlenker, president and founder of the National Center for Chaplain
Development, said the organization has educated more than 1,000
chaplains in the past two years.
Chaplains are basically clergy who serve in specialized settings outside
of a church, such as working with emergency services personnel, the
justice system, schools, hospitals, corporations and other entities,
Schlenker said.
“We’re like the first responder to the first responders,” he said. “We’re an emotional, spiritual parachute.”
Despite coming from a religious background, Schlenker said that
chaplains primarily address a person’s physical and emotional needs,
such as food, shelter and safety.
“A chaplain is primarily secular, not spiritual,” he said, “but spirituality can be a factor, if they bring it up.”
John Avery, one of the instructors with the program, said chaplains need
to be trained in a wide range of areas to be prepared for the
situations they might find themselves in. For example, a chaplain to a
fire department may need to have training for how to operate in a
hazardous materials site and a police chaplain may need to know how to
behave and protect a crime scene while working with individuals on the
scene.
Avery gave a presentation on suicide prevention at Thursday’s class,
specifically on the QRP initiative, which stands for “Question,
Persuade, Refer."
“Suicide is the most preventable form of death,” he said, but people
must be sensitive to the warning signs and be willing to directly
discuss the issue with the person in question in order to have an
effect.
As the program wraps up today, the participants, who came from
California, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Costa Rica, in addition to
Maryland, will be given plenty of time to practice their new techniques
in a simulated setting. Schlenker said the instructors evaluate the
class members to see how well they can demonstrate the skills and
knowledge they were taught through the program.
Wayne Gadow, a volunteer chaplain with the Westminster Police
Department, said he went through a similar program presented by
Schlenker three years ago and was glad to take part again this week.
The program uses the saturation method of teaching, he said, with
different aspects of the same subject areas being repeated throughout
the week so that the information can really soak in.
In addition, the program helps strengthen and invigorate the chaplains,
he said, since they can be personally worn down as well by all of the
stressful situations they help to intervene in.
“People who are doing what we do, we need somebody we can talk to or we can crash,” he said.
Reach staff writer Carrie Ann Knauer at 410-857-7874 or carrie.knauer@carrollcountytimes.com.
THURSDAY, Sept. 20 (HealthDay News) -- More Americans now commit suicide
than die in car crashes, making suicide the leading cause of injury
deaths, according to a new study.
In addition, over the last 10 years, while the number of deaths from car
crashes has declined, deaths from poisoning and falls increased
significantly, the researchers report.
"Suicides are terribly undercounted; I think the problem is much worse
than official data would lead us to believe," said study author Ian
Rockett, a professor of epidemiology at West Virginia University.
There may be 20 percent or more unrecognized suicides, he said.
Many of the poisoning deaths may actually be intended, he added. A lot
of these deaths are due from overdoses of prescription drugs, Rockett
noted.
"We have a situation that has gotten out of hand," he said. "I would
like to see the same attention paid to other injuries as has been paid
to traffic injuries."
The report was published online Sept. 20 in the American Journal of Public Health.
For the study, Rockett's team used data from the U.S. National Center
for Health Statistics to determine the cause of injury deaths from 2000
to 2009.
The leading causes of unintentional deaths were car accidents, poisoning
and falls, and for intentional deaths they were suicide and homicide.
Deaths from intentional and unintentional injury were 10 percent higher in 2009 than in 2000, the researchers noted.
And although deaths from car crashes declined 25 percent, deaths from
poisoning rose 128 percent, deaths from falls increased 71 percent and
deaths from suicides rose 15 percent, according to the study.
Suicide is now the first cause of injury deaths, followed by car crashes, poisoning, falls and murder, Rockett said.
Fewer women die from these causes than men, the researchers noted. In
addition, blacks and Hispanics have fewer car crashes and suicides, but
higher murder rates than whites, they found.
Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of
Suicidology, said, "Both global and national increases in the number and
rate of suicides through 2009, and as even more recent data indicates,
through 2010, should concern all of us."
Prevention of suicides and unintentional injuries would extend the life
of those whose deaths would not have otherwise occurred by some three
decades, he said.
"We know a great deal about how to prevent suicides, but have yet to
overcome centuries of stigmatic attitudes -- and the consequent lack of
political will -- to build the collaborative effort to turn these many
lives from despair and hopelessness to ones of meaning and brighter
futures," Berman added.
Another expert, Simon Rego, director of psychology training at
Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, in New
York City, said that "the time has come for clinicians, public health
officials, state and county health departments, legislatures and
corporations to come together and direct our efforts toward
understanding the etiology and prevention of injury, in particular by
poisoning via prescription medications, falls in the elderly, and most
importantly, suicide -- which is the only intentional injury in this
group."
Recently, the U.S. government along with private groups like Facebook, launched a program focusing on suicide prevention.
In 2009, more than 37,000 Americans took their own lives, and more than
500,000 were at risk of suicide, according to Pamela Hyde, administrator
of the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
The new program will have $56 million of federal money to help fund
suicide prevention programs under the Garrett Lee Smith Memorial Act.
The act was signed into law in memory of the son of Gordon Smith,
president of the National Association of Broadcasters and a former U.S.
Senator, who took his own life nine years ago.
"Our goal is, in the next five years, we will save 20,000 human lives,"
Smith said at a Sept. 10 news conference. "This issue touches nearly
every family. It is something we can do something about. It's the work
of angels."
SOURCES: Ian Rockett, Ph.D., M.P.H., professor, epidemiology, West
Virginia University, Morgantown; Simon Rego, Psy.D., director,
psychology training, Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College
of Medicine, New York City; Lanny Berman, Ph.D., executive director,
American Association of Suicidology, Washington, D.C.; Sept. 20, 2012,
American Journal of Public Health, online
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