Saskatchewan Federation of Police Officers 35 resiliency vary over time based on experience. For example, all else being equal, a police officer encountering a motor vehicle accident after a week of being well-rested, engaged in healthy activities, supported by co-workers and family, can be expected to have lower risk for developing symptoms than an exhausted officer who has had no time for health activities and is having challenges with co-workers and family. This is before we consider other variables such as familiarity with the vehicle or the occupants. In any case, as a simple function of repeated exposure to trauma, it is reasonable to expect public safety personnel will be at higher risk for Operational Stress Injuries. The re-cast as Operational Stress Injuries also appears defensible because the traumatic exposure is by design, rather than happenstance; indeed, exposure to potentially traumatic stressors is an operational function of public safety careers. In recognition of this, an increasing number of Canadian provinces are creating presumptive legislation that will hopefully make it easier for public safety personnel to access mental health services to reduce the impact of Operational Stress Injuries. That presumptive legislation will also, hopefully, continue to reduce the pervasive stigma that so many public safety personnel report experiencing; nevertheless, reducing such stigma will take time. In my experience public safety leadership have been actively and intentionally working to minimize stigma and find innovative ways to improve access to evidence-based mental health care for their teams. Unfortunately, stigma change cannot be ordered, like changing any cognitive bias it takes time – sometimes generations – to become pervasive because we are asking people to change deeply ingrained beliefs that have been learned implicitly and explicitly. Fortunately, as a community unto themselves, our public safety personnel have always taken leadership roles in change and I believe they can do so again, this time for mental health. There is already evidence that police officers are harder on themselves than they are on other officers and on other members of the public when it comes to mental health stigma (e.g., Carlan & Nored, 2008); as such, there has already been a positive shift, which is increasingly being followed by officers being kinder to themselves and seeking support (e.g., Tucker, 2015). Despite the advances being made, there is still a long way to go in providing the resources and support our police and other public safety personnel need and deserve. The research base in particular warrants substantial attention. There is still a great deal of debate regarding how frequently operational stress injuries occur. There is also a paucity of evidence regarding risk and resiliency variables, as well as the effectiveness of organizational interventions (e.g., training, critical incident stress management, peer-support). As we increasingly recognize the presumptive nature of Operational Stress Injuries for our public safety personnel, we must also recognize our responsibility to prevent or minimize those injuries because ignorance regarding mental health is no longer a defensible excuse. Effective prevention and minimization strategies require appropriate research evidence, which takes time and nationally coordinated resources to collect and disseminate; as such, the sooner we begin investing in that research, the sooner we can provide the morally and economically justified evidence-based support we owe our public safety personnel for protecting all of us. For this reason, an increasing number of academics, as well as public safety agencies, leaders, and organizations, are working to develop a Canadian institute to support research and treatment for public safety personnel. Hopefully we will see tangible support for such an institute from Federal and Provincial governments in the near future. Since at least the early 2000s, there has been increasing interest in re-casting posttraumatic diagnoses as injuries rather than disorders; specically, as Operational Stress Injuries. The re-cast appears readily defensible in that the person re-porting symptoms may well be describing a reasonable set of responses to an unreasonable set of experiences. “ ” Potentially Injured, We must now presume: ...continued
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