What if the biggest heroes in our society, first responders, are also the ones silently suffering? Imagine being a police officer, firefighter, ER staff, military personnel, or any first responder, tasked with the wellbeing of others, but grappling with your own issues such as grueling work hours, balancing work and family life, and the potential accumulation of trauma. We step into their shoes, unearthing the challenges they face and the resilience they display. From personal stories of emergency situations to the illuminating discussions on the need for specialized resources, we aim to shed light on the often unseen side of their lives and bring attention to the much-needed support.
With first responders, they carry tales of adventure, tales of courage, but often these stories are shrouded by a cloak of confidentiality, making their socialization a complex process. In this candid conversation, we accentuate the vital importance of a support system that allows them to share their experiences, and the need to recognize their individual capabilities. Looking forward to my dialogue with Liz Kelly in the upcoming episode, we will be navigating through various topics such as holidays, stress, mood disorders, and more. This intimate exploration invites you to glimpse beyond the uniform and into the hearts and minds of our first responders.
What if the biggest heroes in our society, first responders, are also the ones silently suffering? Imagine being a police officer, firefighter, ER staff, military personnel, or any first responder, tasked with the wellbeing of others, but grappling with your own issues such as grueling work hours, balancing work and family life, and the potential accumulation of trauma. We step into their shoes, unearthing the challenges they face and the resilience they display. From personal stories of emergency situations to the illuminating discussions on the need for specialized resources, we aim to shed light on the often unseen side of their lives and bring attention to the much-needed support.
With first responders, they carry tales of adventure, tales of courage, but often these stories are shrouded by a cloak of confidentiality, making their socialization a complex process. In this candid conversation, we accentuate the vital importance of a support system that allows them to share their experiences, and the need to recognize their individual capabilities. Looking forward to my dialogue with Liz Kelly in the upcoming episode, we will be navigating through various topics such as holidays, stress, mood disorders, and more. This intimate exploration invites you to glimpse beyond the uniform and into the hearts and minds of our first responders.
Hi and welcome to Finding your Way Through Therapy. The goal of this podcast is to demystify therapy, what can happen in therapy and the wide array of conversations you can have in and about therapy Through personal experiences. Guests will talk about therapy, their experiences with it and how psychology and therapy are present in many places in their lives, with lots of authenticity and a touch of humor. Here is your host, steve Bisson.
Speaker 2:Merci, mélfoie. Thank you a thousand times. Welcome to Episode 124. If you haven't listened to Episode 123 yet, please go back and listen to it, because Brad Mastrangelo was an amazing person. He's a stand-up comedian. He is someone that I've known through a work colleague, a friend of mine. I went to see him a few weeks ago. He's amazing as a stand-up, so please catch his shows, but also listen to his message about laughter and mental health. But Episode 124 is a little unique. I think it's the second time that I've done this via YouTube as well as recording the episode. If you want to go check it out on YouTube, it's available, which is not typical of my solo episodes. But Episode 124 will be on first responders.
Speaker 2:One of the things that comes up with first responders and the stuff that I've done overall in the years that I've worked with first responders is that there's a lot of things that are very ill-defined, and that's part of the issue with first responders at times. So I wanted to work on a couple of ideas. The first thing is that first responders are usually the first to the scene or the first to intervene in a crisis situation of some sort. It doesn't always have to be crisis, but it could be through working in the community, working in a larger community and so on and so forth. So how I define it by role and this is very tough because I had this conversation with a girlfriend who's also a nurse, who's a nurse director in an ER we were talking about what is a first responder, so I try to give the best definition I can. If you see me look to the left on the YouTube videos because I'm reading it. First of all it's police, local and state. So if you have state police, local police is defined as you look at certain areas where every town has a police department some places have none and is manned by the county sheriff, which the sheriff's departments are also first responders, particularly in many other states. I'm going to be a little northeast biased here, but at the same time I'm trying to be also as open as I can about what our first responders Fire departments. So firefighters show up on scene. They do medicals now more often than they do fires, which is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time, but I consider fire. Most in the northeast are EMTs or paramedics in the firefighter departments around here, but those are also first responders and you have private companies Ketaldo out here and I'm not trying to plug one, I'm just giving an example. But there are many, many, many different versions of private paramedics who go on call and are there Dispatchers.
Speaker 2:Dispatchers are the forgotten police department people. They are taking most of the calls. They're not always taking the calls, but they take on the calls. They might dispatch the call, but they also will be on the phone with the person as well as the first responder going to the call. And sometimes they don't know right away what happens. They are left in the dark, so to speak, and sometimes they got to answer the next phone call. So dispatchers are there to guide you in that way. Thank you. Er staff in general and this is depending on every area you're in, but in the Northeast, emergency medical workers nurses, doctors, people who do everything that goes with that are part of the first responders in my book and sometimes we will have the people who are military personnel and keeping that in mind, because military personnel sometimes are the first responders, depending on the situation we're in I can go on and on.
Speaker 2:You've listened to my episodes before and if you haven't go back to listen to some of them, I'm also going to have. You know, I've had the first responders in crisis. I had J Bal on many times. I had Brad Cohen, who's also a correctional staff, who works for the Sheriff's Department, and we all talked about traumas and what people see and the issues that go with that.
Speaker 2:But what I really want to address is what's the other stuff? So everyone thinks, well, you know, you knew mental health because you had blank event that really affected you, which happens, and I'm okay with that and I'm more than happy to support anyone who has been going through difficulties in that situation, so to speak. When I think about my first responders in general, I know that it is difficult to explain sometimes those words and they may come in because of that, but typically 90% of my conversations are not about significant trauma that happened at work could be an accumulation of trauma. That's possible too, and sometimes we do a quick. You know, three or four sessions with someone who's referred to me went through an emergency situation, wants a process system to discuss it.
Speaker 2:So I think that what I really want to focus on in this episode is the other stuff that we don't talk about the weird hours. Being one of them being a firefighter means 24 hours plus, and what I mean by that is there's many fire departments that are also very short staff, so you end up doing a lot of covering and being away from your family for 24 plus hours and then you are with a family which is your firefighter family, so to speak. You know that just makes for weird balance in your life, even if you only have two shifts a week, which is, you know it happens, obviously, but you know you work one or two off and then you're back on for 24. It just makes for, you know, kind of a weird hour type of situation. Sometimes you're trying, you know, if you have two calls between three and six, you're going to sleep that next morning, but if you have no calls that night, then you're able to sleep and then have a regular day. But that's not predictable.
Speaker 2:You look at police departments and sheriff's departments. You know eight hour shifts, 12 hour shifts, sometimes being forced because they're short staff also, and you know taking a uniform, being, you know, making sure that the community's safe, and then going home and saying, all right, now you'd get to be a partner, you get to be a husband, wife, you get to be a father, you get to be a son. You get to be whatever your family role is and I don't want to go through all of them, but you know those relationships. It's a quick shift. You know, I was talking to a few friends of mine over the course of the last few months and we were talking about how you know if you have, if you work, you finish at 11pm and you were on a first responder type of shift. You're not going to bed till 1am because you're kind of decompressing. Some people are able to do that and congratulations for them, but on a general standpoint we're just too raw and we need to be able to handle it. So therefore we have trouble getting to bed. So it makes for another weird day in the scheduling. And there's also like if you finish at a four o'clock and then you know you had a typical hard day or not a typical hard day, just an easy day.
Speaker 2:It's hard to make the shift from police work to home life and doing that shift sometimes is very, very complicated and so give it. You know how do we communicate that with our spouses, and those are difficult too, because their spouses too, they're working hard and doing maybe something that is not first responder related, but at the end of the day, you know, we feel like we need to get some time off, and how do we ask our partners in regards to that? I talk about that because I think that's a lot of the stuff that occurs right. There's so many things I can say in regards to that, but ultimately it's you go from a uniform and in charge to an equal partnership or as a dad, and you know you have kids who may or may not listen to you and you can't use that type of authority. And it's not that police officers always use authority I'm giving an example or sheriffs or whatever. It's just that makes for a change.
Speaker 2:If you worked in an ER shift that was really late, you know I can include my good friends at the crisis mental health crisis teams, you know, shout out to them, but you know, when you had a hard day at work and you got to get home and do XYZ, it's not an easy transition. It's a hard shift. I think that that happens a whole lot more than most people really recognize, and the dispatchers are in that same boat. But I wanted to make sure I touch on everyone. But this is generalized statements, but I just don't want you to think that you know, for people in these types of in the fields of first responders, the mental health issues, just a trauma or an event.
Speaker 2:There's so many other things. Another one that comes up is the socializing aspect Thing that we've had a few guests. I know J Bal talked about it, I know Brian talked about it. But you know you get home you go socialize with others. You know I always joke around and this is from the old training I did. But you know police like to be in the back of a room so they can see the whole room because no one can be behind them, so to speak. You know, and you bring that home, right, because you're still sometimes wearing that hat and it's hard to disconnect from your work on a regular basis, never mind when you're working in that particular work. But socializing, and you know always.
Speaker 2:You know Jay always says you know people always ask me for my worst story or my best story or whatever. Well, maybe you know a lot of talk about, right, that's not the first thing that comes to mind and you want to be a human being and I don't go around and say, hey, what's your best accountant's story? Or hey, what's your best engineering story. Most people don't talk about that they, but you know they'll ask first responders whether it's an ER, dispatchers or what have you. They ask them for stories and that's not something that's easy to explain for a whole lot of people, so I just wanted to throw that out there too.
Speaker 2:One of the other things, too, is maybe you have a call with a child that was three years old. Xyz happens there and I'm trying not to trigger anyone and that's hopefully okay with most of you and then you get home to your three year old child, who could have been in that same exact situation, and that creates like parallels in your life and makes you think but how do you share that with your spouse? How do you share that with a partner? How do you share that with anyone? It's a really hard share because it's like you know I've I've experienced it that sometimes I share some of the concerns I have with former partners particularly, but they they can't really get it. You know like it gets hard and then you get into dark humor just to survive it, right, and sometimes partners don't really get that, or family members right, like what's wrong with you and like you know, as I joke around with all my clients and anyone who asked me what's wrong with you, I'm like boy, do you have an hour? I think we're all screwed up in the head, we're just screwed up differently.
Speaker 2:But this really can screw up your work, and not being able to talk about it too right, that's just so important to think about. I can't go on and say, oh, you know what my client said today about this when they were in the ER, or you know so and so from this show is in the ER right now would blankety blank not making it up as I go, but you can't talk about your job, so to speak, because some of it is confidential, some of it you cannot share, and when you do share, sometimes you go overboard and it becomes a little bit problematic. So it's a really hard thing to keep in mind. When you see one person a week, that would be, that would be easy. When you're working, you know 40 plus hours a week, you're going to see a whole lot of different things, a lot of different situations. So it's hard to kind of like explain all these things and putting it into words that people can understand and not turn into dark humor or like how difficult it was for you.
Speaker 2:But finally, the other part that I wanted to mention is resources. So you know Massachusetts I love Massachusetts because you know we have McLean's Hospital down the street, we have Onsite, which is an amazing program, and I'm going to have Dr Duggan on in a few weeks but when you don't have those resources, how do you reach out for resources? You know, one of the conversations I've had with other people is If you go to my website, you go to many places. I don't really typically call myself a specialist of first responders, and the reason why I'm not putting that out there because I feel like there's a lot of people who claim to be in there or not, and it's also kind of like not. How do you really measure that? I know that I'm not going to name the insurance company, but an insurance company took me off their first responders list because I didn't do their training and I did their training and I was like this is ridiculous. That doesn't even prepare you for first responders. So how do we do that? And I think that you know that's part of what I want to.
Speaker 2:There's a few ideas besides making sure to understand that first responders have, you know, unique challenges for their own mental health and no, it's not about trauma, it's about other stuff too in their lives. But it's also the resources. How are we going to connect them to resources we have on site? We have McLean's, but an outpatient and how do we get people who are truly used to hearing this stuff? Because I know that some of my colleagues have told me like I don't know if I could hear those stories or those difficulties. And that's okay, there's nothing wrong with that. That's you need to know what your wheelhouse is.
Speaker 2:But I also know that there's first responders who told me that they went to a therapist who claimed to be a specialist and it wasn't. And I'm going to that's as much as I can share her. And here's the. I'm not a first responder, but stuff we can't really talk about here on a national podcast or international podcast, depending on how you see it. So how do we help them with resources?
Speaker 2:I think that you know it's finding, you know. You know there's the. There's firefighters associations, there's police associations, the sheriff's association, there's employee assistance programs that can be beneficial, especially for emergency medical workers. In most hospitals they have that. But it's also kind of defining this and finding ways to what is a good resource.
Speaker 2:You know someone who will understand the complexities of those relationships and first responders, because, again, it's not just the blank event that causes a first responder to get help, but there's so many other things and sometimes I've seen too many first responders therapists among others go directly to but what's your worst story? And tell me about that trauma. And trauma doesn't show up that way necessarily for first responders. So I want to break a few walls, myths, and also try to be supportive to my first responder friends. And for the resources, hey, you know what I mean. The claims is good, call the ones that you know, but ultimately I wish that we had more resources, not less resources. Episode 125 will be with Liz Kelly. Liz Kelly is a former colleague of mine and we're going to talk about maybe the holidays, maybe we'll talk about stress, maybe we'll talk about mood disorders, maybe we'll just shoot the shit, who knows? But I hope you join me for the next episode.
Speaker 1:For assistance. This number is available in the United States.