Do more to help first responders

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2024 (678 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

First and foremost, our condolences to the family and friends of Preston Heinbigner, a Winnipeg firefighter who died earlier this month at the age of 40.

Friends and family have said Heinbigner had struggled with the trauma he had seen while responding to calls on the job, and took his own life.

Heinbigner, sadly, is far from alone. The fallout for emergency services workers is real, even if there aren’t obvious physical injuries.

For all first responders, there are risks. And not just the ordinary risks of dangerous work environments and dangerous situations — there is also the very real toll that witnessing others’ pain and suffering can cause. Officially, it gets the long diagnostic name of post-traumatic stress disorder.

It’s a complex matter of experiencing too much and being unable to process it all safely. Damage can be cumulative, or the result of specific experiences.

There are elements of PTSD that can be almost surreal.

While you’re asleep — if you sleep — startlingly realistic dreams that take you back deep into past horrors, or invent completely new ones out of fragments of other memories. Dreams that repeat themselves, day after day, and shock you awake every single time.

While you’re awake, feelings of anger, failure and betrayal. Maybe you start to preplan every aspect of your daily life, just so that you’ll be ready if something happens.

Loneliness and anger, as you watch while the world goes on around you, a world blissfully ignorant of what you’ve seen and felt and still live with. That you will live with for months, for years, for always.

Sometimes, there’s a strange addiction to the adrenalin of what you do, so much so that you don’t want to admit that you’re having issues because your employer might pull you off the job. It’s a paradox that you can still love a job that’s actually trying to kill you.

For years, first responders were told to just tough it out. Break an arm, and the cast you’ll end up wearing will tell everyone you’re injured. Break your brain, and the injury can be virtually invisible to the people around you. You may be depressed — you may be overly quiet. You may turn to drugs or alcohol to try and dull the intruding noises down. You may not be able to cope with even the simplest complications of family life.

But the symptoms can be less than obvious. You may just seem withdrawn, or lean into routine as if it’s critically important — and to you, it is.

It is a truly kaleidoscopic hell.

There isn’t a magic solution. There are treatments, with different individual levels of success. Counselling, of course, cognitive behavioural therapy, cognitive processing therapy, eye movement desensitization therapy (known as EMDR) and some drug therapies as well.

But you have to get help to first responders when they need it, and they can be their own worst enemies.

The provincial government has taken the step of announcing it would hire three counsellors to work with police, firefighters and paramedics, putting forward the idea of regular mental health checks with first responders.

That is a good idea: normalizing regular contact with mental health professionals could take away some of the stigma of admitting to having problems, and building mental health protections into the job will help normalize the fact that no one can simply tough it out.

But it is only a start.

We ask so much from first responders that we have to do a better job of protecting them.

Preston Heinbigner has reminded us that we’re not doing enough.