Firefighters, mental health and workers compensation

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This article was published 18/06/2024 (502 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

What’s interesting is that it’s a news story.

Because it shouldn’t have to be a news story — it should be simple enough to recognize that mental health issues are health issues.

Monday’s Free Press carried a story about the fact that Manitoba’s Workers Compensation Board had accepted that the death of Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service member Preston Heinbigner was the result of a workplace injury.

Heinbigner took his own life on April 9 after battling with post-traumatic stress disorder.

“As far as firefighters are concerned, it was never in doubt that the exposure to the things on the job were the dominant cause of his troubled mind, it was just a matter of connecting the dots, posthumously,” United Firefighters of Winnipeg president Tom Bilous said Saturday. “We feel vindicated. Everybody does.”

There shouldn’t have to have been vindication. There should have just been recognition.

Think about it this way: two firefighters enter a burning building to search for possible victims. They’re wearing their full protective equipment, hauling a hoseline in through heat and smoke, but when they make their way up a flight of stairs to the second floor, parts of the stairs collapse.

One firefighter is lightly injured with a mild back injury: she’s off on sick leave for the amount of time it takes to recover from her injury.

No need for a news story about the fact she was granted sick leave.

The other firefighter falls further and more awkwardly, and is more seriously hurt. A pair of crushed vertebrae mean surgery, followed by rehabilitation. His doctors release medical reports to Workers Compensation, who may follow up by having their own doctors examine the injured firefighter. If the firefighter’s injury is determined to be a compensationable injury, the paperwork is done (albeit perhaps more slowly than it should be in a perfect world) and the world moves painfully along.

Once again, no need for a news story.

But then there’s Preston Heinbigner’s injury.

He fell, too, but in a way that his injury wasn’t obvious just by looking at him. After dealing with traumatic emergency calls for years,

“He had a ton of empathy and compassion on calls, and excellent bedside manner,” Bilous said. “However, we didn’t fully realize how much of those unnatural things we see (that) he was taking home and was bothering him.”

Emergency services have changed, and there is far more recognition about the damage done by the trauma that first responders face. First responders themselves have gotten more vocal about what had been a far more private and personal struggle, and services have slowly improved.

But that doesn’t mean that compensation for those injuries is straightforward.

“Today, even more so than as near as two or three years ago, members are more likely to file claims. That’s the good news, there’s a heightened awareness and acceptance by our peers to talk and file claims and so on,” Bilous said. “Acceptance is a different story.”

In some ways, it’s a familiar story for emergency workers: it hasn’t been all that many years since provincial workplace compensation boards grudgingly accepted that firefighters faced heightened cancer risks from a variety of carcinogens they have been exposed to while fighting fires.

But mental health injuries seem to have been in a class all their own, one where workers with the least strength to fight for assistance and compensation, also had to fight the hardest.

An injury that manifests inside your psyche is a tragic fact, but is also every bit as real as any other injury.

To repeat: the provincial bureaucracy accepting that fact shouldn’t have to be news.

It should be a matter of course.