Police, firefighters, paramedics, and others who put their lives on the line to serve the public are themselves facing a crisis. Studies show they’re stressed out, short-staffed, and at an increased risk of suicide.
When the well-being of our nation’s emergency personnel suffers, so do our communities, as inadequate resources lead to increased response times — or sometimes, no response at all.
A recent Lexipol Media Group report found mental health challenges are a leading cause of recruitment and retention struggles, which is no wonder. FBI data from 2023 found first responders are exposed to “an average of 178 critical incidents throughout their career, while the average person encounters two to three traumatic events in their life.”
‘That stuff builds up’
The emergency service providers I visited in Chester County, Pennsylvania, (Upper Uwchlan, West Goshen, and East Pikeland Township) mention in passing unthinkable tragedies that are difficult to write about, let alone to have experienced and been haunted by, as these people must investigate cases of child sex abuse, gruesome suicides, violent murders, and heart-wrenching accidents for months after they happen.
“That stuff builds up, builds up, builds up, and if [the first responders] don’t get some kind of help and understanding, how to deal with what they’re facing, then that’s why you hear about suicides after retirement,” said Jerry Schwartz, Chester County Critical Incident Stress Management, or CISM, program coordinator, peer support specialist, and senior chaplain. “Thoughts come back and memories of things they never really processed, and they weigh heavily on them.”
Brenda Bernot, Michelle Major, and Tom Jones are three Chester County police chiefs seeking to halt devastating mental health trends among first responders by making chaplains and CISM peer-support teams available to their staff.
Jones is a seasoned officer who understands that officers might be hesitant to seek help. “They oftentimes don’t want to tell the boss they need to speak to somebody,” he said. “There’s an intimidation factor. They think, ‘Is that going to make me look weak?’”
The stigma the chiefs know is attached to first responders seeking help is why they encourage their officers to talk to chaplains.
“We don’t need to know about it,” Jones said. “If there’s a crisis we can help with, we’re here. Outside of that, it’s those guys on a personal level.”
Jones said that when he was a younger officer, things he saw tended to be dismissed. “It was a ‘suck it up and get back to work’ kind of attitude.”
Jones remembers having to deal with the tragedy of a little boy whose birthday was the next day who was run over by his school bus in front of his parents’ house and killed.
“I wish we had had [chaplains and CISM] in the past,” Jones said. “I was on that case for weeks, and it took me a few years to be able to patrol that street. If you deal with these things along the way, it’s not quite as bad as the buildup.”
Peter Drinkwater, a licensed pastor, volunteers as a chaplain for Jones’s Upper Uwchlan Township Police Department and as a CISM team member. He does ride-alongs with police officers “as often as possible” with as many different people as he can.
‘The ministry of presence’
“We just talk about life,” Drinkwater said. “I’m not prying. I ask open-ended questions about who they are. You have to gain trust as a chaplain. Police are not very trusting people in the first place because of all they go through and what they see. … As a chaplain, we learned early on in training that we have ‘the ministry of presence.’ The ministry of presence is: We’re there. We’re available. We’re listening. So that’s what I do in the car. I hear all kinds of things — what’s going on at home, what’s bothering them, that sort of thing. You’re somebody to talk to who’s going to keep it to yourself.”
Patrolman Dan Corbo helped spearhead getting chaplains installed at the East Pikeland Township Police Department. He said having four sworn in this year was “a blessing.”
“We send solo officers out a lot of times, so when we do things like notifications for people’s death, that’s hard as a solo officer,” Corbo said. “To have someone like a chaplain, especially those who have done it over the years and are used to it, they can come in with a younger officer and give comfort to a family for an officer who might not be able to do it.”
A community resource
Corbo recounted how his department recently used a chaplain for marriage counseling. The police were called for a domestic incident, and Corbo said he recognized the couple wasn’t a “regular customer” of the department.
“There wasn’t physical abuse going on,” he said. “It was clear it was a communication problem, marriage issues. They were embarrassed that they even called the police, but I was able to put them in contact with our chaplain because one of the things they said was, ‘We can’t afford counseling, but we know we need it.’ The chaplains are able to offer that. They’ve been counseling them ever since, and that was a couple of months ago. They’re not just there to minister to the officers; they’re a community resource for us.”
“Being a small department, it’s hard to get resources for a lot of reasons, financial being one of them,” Major said. The chaplains get paid nothing but “provide the officers someone they can go where there’s not a negative stigma, where they don’t have to reach out through an [Employee Assistance Program] or another method to go get someone to talk to where there might be a stigma. Because cops, let’s face it, we don’t like that. We would maybe view it as embarrassing. Chaplains are a resource to bolster what we do in our department.”
According to Corbo, “The biggest hurdle is getting chaplains in the police car.” Officers may wonder, “‘Is this guy a spy for the chief? Is he going to thump a Bible over my head?’ But once they’re in the car, it’s not what they’re expecting. It’s just another guy or girl in the vehicle with them, and they’re having conversations. They’re not there to proselytize to them. They’re not there to psychoanalyze them. They’re just there to ride along. And they find out very quickly that they’re just normal people. We don’t force anything on anybody, but once they get over the idea there’s going to be a street preacher in the car with them, every time, they’re fine with it.”
Major said her department has called chaplains out “for many things.” She recalled a very serious accident that happened when she was out of state and “felt helpless.” Wes Weber, one of her chaplains, was one of her very first phone calls. His response was, “I’ll be there. Tell me where to go.”
Trust and legitimacy
Chaplains are also a valuable tool for bridging the communication gap between first responders and the public. Citing the “black eye” the police suffered after the death of George Floyd and “other awful police incidents out there,” Major said it’s “exciting to see how the chaplain program helps us move forward as a society.”
“I don’t believe [that police officer] wanted to kill [Floyd],” Major said. “I truly don’t. It could have been that he had things piling up inside of him, and he got locked in in those nine minutes. Having this resource to help officers let this stuff out will hopefully stop us from having that next George Floyd incident. We have to stay ahead of it and above it. We need to build trust and legitimacy with the public. We serve the public. We don’t sell widgets. We sell our service. And what the community wants, we have to deliver that. That’s our product. And I think the chaplains are such a great resource to help us deliver that product.”
A normal recovery process
CISM is an international program whose mission is “to provide a corps of trained volunteers and professionals to help emergency service providers handle stress. Team members are mental health professionals, emergency service peers, and clergy. Each team member is trained and experienced in his or her own field and has undergone a specifically prescribed course of instruction in emergency service stress intervention.” It is “a confidential, non-evaluative discussion of the involvement, thoughts, reactions, and feelings resulting from an incident … designed to facilitate a normal recovery process in a normal person suffering normal effects after an encounter with an abnormal situation.”
“I’m not a member [of CISM], but I’m probably their greatest fan,” Bernot said. “I learned the value of help when I was diagnosed with PTSD at the age of 19. The help I received made me go on to become a police officer, and I spent the last 40 years as a police officer. You see the day-to-day stress that the officers undergo, and you see the aftermath — the suicides, the destroyed marriages, the abuse, the alcoholism, the drug use. You see all of the negative, and I knew there had to be a better way, and when I got here as the chief, I saw that the county already had [CISM] in place. It is truly amazing.”
Bernot cited a horrific case her department responded to involving an attack on a 9-year-old girl as one that could affect even the most experienced emergency responder.
“She was in cardiac arrest when they got there. There was not a part on her body that wasn’t bruised…. Everybody who was involved in that incident was traumatized, and I got outstanding feedback on the CISM group’s efforts to work with every emergency responder involved in that case. We spend money on so many things in this country, but our most valuable people, sometimes I think we cut it short,” Bernot said.
Bernot likened being an emergency responder to being a can of soda. “On every shift, you get shook a little bit. Sometimes it’s days, weeks, months, but sooner or later, something’s going to give, and if we don’t take care of our people, we’re really out of luck because we’re going to lose some amazing people, and the ripple effect that will have on the community is not a positive one.”
Wesley Holman, a sergeant in the West Goshen Township Police Department patrol division and a CISM team member, related to Bernot’s analogy. He remembers being called to an accident, and the next thing he knew, he was tackling a guy at the scene. Someone asked him what he was doing, and he didn’t know. Around the same time, he blew up at his son for not putting his dishes away. He kicked open the boy’s bedroom door, dragged him down the steps, and, as Holman put it, “I lost my s***.” At that point, he started thinking about life, “stuff I hadn’t dealt with,” and decided to figure it out on his own.
Holman’s story is similar to those I hear other CISM team members relate to: The trauma they endured led them to a crisis point, and learning to process it properly spurred their servant natures to want to help others.
Miraculous things
CISM’s guided defusing and debriefing sessions “give people a safe, controlled environment to tell their version of the story,” Holman said. Through these gatherings, combined with other support programs, CISM helps people involved in critical incidents cope by transitioning an emotional response to a more rational understanding of events — to navigate the “maybe I could’ves” and the “what ifs” to find peace. CISM also equips them with the tools to process future stressors.
“I wish we could film those debriefings,” Schwartz said, “because we’ve seen some really miraculous things take place during them. It’s like a light comes on, and what was totally darkness, they see differently.”
“I tell my officers, ‘You get your blood pressure checked, you get dentistry, you get blood work, you get all this good stuff, why not get a checkup for your mental health?’” Bernot said, as Schwartz interjected: “A checkup from the neck up!”
“A checkup from the neck up, exactly,” Bernot said. “With the latest murder-suicide debriefing [CISM did], I got so much positive feedback, even from some of the salty old dogs. They said, ‘Yeah, this is a good program.’”
CISM isn’t limited to what most people think of as first responders, either. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it provided services to a maternity ward, a psychology office, and a crime victim center.
“Just because they’re not first responders, the emotional response is the same,” Schwartz said. “We use the same tools and techniques. We help them in the situation, but it also helps them the rest of their life that they know how to deal with something, process it, get the help they need, then they can go on and live without some of the baggage that some of these things bring.”
Bernot said she has witnessed some of the most testosterone-fueled, bulletproof, type-A tough guys transformed by CISM.
“[One SWAT team member] has emerged a much more sensitive, giving officer in dealing with the public,” she said. “The benefit [of CISM], besides the fact that everybody is living a better life, is that going through the traumatic experience and getting the support makes you a better officer, better able to serve, a better husband or wife, a better parent. It makes you a better person. I’ve seen it. I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and having that kind of support makes a difference.”
Willingness to serve
Though the chaplains and many on the CISM team are driven by their Christian faith, “You don’t have to necessarily believe in God,” Major said, “but we should be serving with that value system.”
Drinkwater added, “I was called to be a chaplain. I care for people. It’s what I do. As a Christian, it’s my job to influence every part of society wherever I go. My responsibility is to be a positive influence and to give — not only to police but to anybody,” and that’s what being a chaplain and part of the CISM team is all about.
“They want to serve,” Corbo said of chaplains. “They don’t question it. They just show up.”
“We are serious about vetting the people who join the team,” Schwartz concluded. “I have no doubt we have saved some lives from suicide, and a whole lot more have kept their jobs because they were able to process what happened to them.”
Teresa Mull is an assistant editor of the Spectator World and author of Woke-Proof Your Life.
