Keeping Well. Coping

Abstract

Police organisations across the globe have not been well known for offering any form of resilience training to officers at the beginning or during their careers. Most officers have therefore relied on natural coping skills and a culture of toughness in the face of the challenges of the job. Police operational culture has reinforced such an approach but change is in the wind. Some officers become emotionally “numb” when on duty; this often transferring into their private lives with devastating consequences. This chapter examines how the traditional use of alcohol as a coping mechanism by police officers is changing, how humour promotes resilience, how some officers rely on life partners to debrief and how others never take their work home. Critical incident debriefing, the so-called Mitchell model, has been the focus of much debate in recent years among the helping professions. The arguments are described in this chapter as well as the impact the absence of debriefs has on police officers challenged by events that are out of the ordinary for them. The interviews add much detail around how officers stay well in a “command and control” management environment described by one psychiatrist as “toxic”.