Why Police Need Mental Health Training Like Firearms

A lot of police wellness talk starts after something terrible happens. We wanted to start earlier and go deeper, into the daily mechanics of the job that slowly shape sleep, mood, relationships, and long-term health. I’m joined by Kevin Gilmartin, a retired law enforcement veteran and clinical psychologist who’s been watching the evolution of first responder mental health since the 1970s, and he brings a blunt, practical view of what actually changes outcomes.

We dig into why law enforcement trains relentlessly for tactics yet rarely treats mental health training, sleep hygiene, and recovery as mandatory readiness skills. Kevin connects the dots between sleep impairment and judgment errors, then pushes beyond the usual “short game” focus on critical incidents and PTSD. The bigger risk is what builds quietly over years: burnout, disengagement, cynicism, and preventable disease that steals retirement from the people who earned it.

One of the most memorable parts is Kevin’s biological lens on officer safety and hypervigilance. The same distrust-based alertness that keeps officers alive on the street can drive a stress cycle of cortisol, glucose dumping, insulin response, abdominal weight gain, and a predictable march toward type 2 diabetes and heart risk. We also talk leadership versus bosses, what real leadership looks like in the moment, and why coaching and mentorship can keep good cops good for the next 10, 20, even 40 years.

If you care about first responder wellness, police mental health, and practical resilience that holds up over a career, press play. Subscribe, share this with someone in the job, and leave us a review so more people can find the long-game approach to serving and surviving.

You can find Kevin at his website at https://emotionalsurvival.com/author.htm

Buy his book at this link. 

Transcript

Show Mission And Guest Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to Resilience Development in Action with Steve B. So this is the podcast dedicated to first responder mental health, helping police, fire, EMS, dispatchers, and paramedics create better growth environments for themselves and their team. Let's get started.

SPEAKER_02 0:36

She was amazing, and I hope you enjoy that talk about Grandit Recovery Centers, which is made for uh first responders, which is pretty out awesome. But speaking of someone who is an advocate for first responders, this is someone who was recommended to me. I had read his book and I really enjoyed it. And this is about 10, 15 years ago, just being honest with Kevin here. But when I read the book, I thought it was really great. And then I do my survey every year, as you guys heard in the other episode. And two people said to me, You need to have Kevin Gilmartin on. And I'm like, perfect. Let me contact him. Let's take a shot. The guy responded to me in like an hour. And I can't tell you how invaluable that is. If you work in this world, you know that getting a quick answer is the key to great relationships. But Kevin Gilmartin, welcome to Finding Your Not Finding.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Thank you for having me, Steve. My pleasure.

SPEAKER_02 1:27

Resilience Development in Action. I changed the name about a year ago, still haven't recommended in my head. It's really an honor to have you here. I I again I truly enjoyed the book. It talks a lot about the emotional survival skills that people need to work in the first responder world, particularly police officers. I'd like you to introduce yourself maybe to people because I feel like I know you from those reading and we we spoke offline, so this is even better. But can you introduce yourself to the audience in case they don't know who you are?

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Well, I'm a clinical psychologist retired from law enforcement. I'm an old guy, so I've had the blessing or curse, whatever you want to call it, of being in this field from pretty much the beginning of the whole mental health for a first responders field. Going back to the 1970s, working at moderate-sized law enforcement agency, and watching watching what wasn't existing then. There were no mental health services to speak of. Then watching it as the years have developed and passed, and through to my own retirement from law enforcement, then into a life of being a clinical psychologist. But I've just seen how the field has changed and has shaped differently, and how how our services have developed. So that's sort of my background. I'm raised up in Arizona after high school, went into the Marine Corps, then went to the University of Arizona where I obtained my PhD in clinical psychology. I was sort of fortunate that I finished my degree fairly early in my employment in law enforcement. So I was able to get into a behavioral sciences unit, which was different than what they are today, but it let me sort of have a firsthand see on the trials and tribulations of a life of uh being in law enforcement, watching some of my friends struggle and and some crash during during those years.

Training Gaps In Police Wellness

SPEAKER_02 3:25

Well, when we read your book, there's clearly a lot of passion that comes from that experience as a law enforcement officer and working in that field.

Sleep Hygiene And Judgment Errors

SPEAKER_01 3:34

Well, you know, we train in law enforcement. We we train for tactical hands-on skills. For example, going to the range. Nobody would expect a law enforcement officer to not have to go qualify at the range. And as the decades have passed, the way we qualify has changed. It's no longer, you know, 25 meters back, two minutes to shoot five rounds. Uh, that's what it was when I joined. Then each year it became more reactive, it became more judgment pistol shooting, it became more realistic based, uh, night shooting, weekhand shooting, the things that that we learned from the tragedies of officers being ill-prepared for the tactical encounter they got into. But we don't train for mental health. We we don't train for the the issues that we want to make sure that that officer, when they're on the street doing their job, is 100%. And we we don't. I'll give you one very simple example where where we don't. Very few police departments have mandatory training in sleep hygiene. Sleep impairment, where they come from, how come cops are high risk for sleep impairment? Yet we know two things. 83% of police officers have diagnosable sleep disorders. They're sleep impaired. They they get two hours less sleep every day than they need. But the critical issue is when you compare a police officer to a factory worker, in a judgment and reaction time study, the police officer makes 600% more reaction time errors and judgment errors than a factory worker. Now, a judgment and reaction time error for a police officer can be deadly either to the police officer or to the citizen they're interacting with. So one of the things I believe I'm passionate for is if we're going to put good quality police officers on the streets, we have to factor in mental health and wellness services. If we don't, we're incompetent in leadership. Just the same as if we weren't putting our officers on the range to qualify. And it's no different.

SPEAKER_02 5:45

Well, the the sleep hygiene thing is something I talk about a lot, my guys, because it is hard. You know, the shift work is really hard, and if it's a 4-2, it's even harder. But it it's learning to do that sleep hygiene, that regular sleep, getting those hours, getting also kind of like setting up your body to go fall asleep, whether you finish at midnight, whether you you you you finish at eight or four. It doesn't matter. I think that's important.

Short Game Trauma Versus Long Game

SPEAKER_01 6:11

Well, it it's terribly important. I I think it's probably the single most important issue to good judgment is sleep hygiene, because it also kicks off a whole cascade of other biologic changes that the cop will pay the price for, not when they're 25, but maybe when they're 45. And what we start shortening life expectancy with some very basic issues that can occur. But uh as the years have passed for me looking at this field, I think we've done a wonderful job with mental health services in some ways in in the United States. And I think Canada in some ways has been ahead of us. Australia has been way ahead of us. Uh when I say us, I mean the United States. But I think we make a mistake in that we only play the short game. By that I mean the critical incident has become the major focus of many therapists. The only culprit that's in town is post-traumatic stress disorder, which I'm not in any way minimizing PTSD. No, but we played the short game to get the person through the aftermath of that traumatic event, and yet we don't do anything for the long game. And there's one group of cops that I've been studying and watching for I think 52 years right now. And we're going to have another uh reunion with in a in about three weeks. And I've watched that group very specifically as I've watched them transition from young men and young women to old men and old women. And many of them are falling victim and dying from diseases that could have been prevented if we had had wellness woven into the fabric of the policing culture, which we don't have. We're very good at at the critical incident. Uh you know, I remember getting called to many major critical incident scenes, going to the the Oklahoma City bombing and watching as as mental health services were being implemented there. They did a very good job. Then shooting forward a few years to Hurricane Andrew, Hurricane Katrina, and watching how more services work. Then 9-11 and and realizing when I got called to 9-11 that I didn't need to be there. There are so many mental health services. And in your state, in in Massachusetts, I was running the marathon when the bomb went off and was asked to stick around, then realized there's no need for me to be here. We really have mental health services for the short game understood, but we're still not doing anything to educate our police officers to understand that if you're going to be a police officer, you're at high risk for heart disease, you're at high risk for depression, you're at high risk for type 2 diabetes, and we're not connecting those dots, and they're clearly job-caused. And we can do so much better a job in the overall wellness, not just committed to have a good cop on the street, but given this man or woman the capacity to enjoy their retirement, do 20, 30 years of service, then have a healthy, functional life for the rest of their the years on this earth. So that that's kind of my passions to doing that.

SPEAKER_02 9:38

I wrote so many notes here. I don't think I'm gonna get all right away, but you know, I don't want a good cop for right now, I want a good cop for a long period of time. And I think that that's lost sometimes. You know, that's why, like for me, I I I push wellness visits mental health-wise. And those are not meant to be every day or every week, and frankly, they're meant for every year unless you need more.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

You know, go ahead. Well, a quote that hit me right between the eyes was a billion years ago, many, many, many years ago. I was attending uh a political political talk by Robert F. Kennedy a week before he was assassinated. And he made, and during the talk, he just said every community has the police department that it deserves. And someone's what do you mean by that? He said, Well, if you're not going to take care of your police, you're going to abuse your police, then that's what you'll get. You'll you'll you'll get police officers that are substandard. If you invest in your police, and I don't I don't mean just in terms of uh salaries, but investing in them in resources, involvement in the community, and woven into the fabric of your community, you'll have an excellent law enforcement community. You know, it was sort of like Sir Robert Peel's, you know, the community is the police, and the police are the community. And and and I think the mental health field is one that really can can lend itself to that philosophy.

Getting Leaders To Buy In

SPEAKER_02 11:09

Well, having done both, for me, there's a lot of exposures that we do as a therapist that can be called vicarious trauma. I know that there's a lot of vicarious trauma that occurs in the police world. I think there's a lot of commonalities in that way. I know for us, we talk to therapists, and one of the things, and I have them I have the fortunate luck to have many mentors in my life that if I'm having an issue, I can call them in my therapy world. In our field of the first responder world, particularly police, we usually have leadership. And sometimes leadership can be the best thing in the world, and sometimes it can be the hardest thing in the world. This is come the this comes from someone I work with who submitted a question. How do we get leadership to buy into this? Because when you talk about every community gets the police they deserve, essentially, how do we get leadership to buy into like getting a good cop, not for now, but a good cop for the next 40 years?

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Well, you know, it's it's funny. I don't know if I'll agree with you that we have a lot of leadership. We have a lot of bosses, we have a lot of people that have rank and they can tell you what to do.

SPEAKER_02 12:17

I've got these bars, can't you see them?

Leadership Modeled In Real Moments

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Yeah, and and that's exactly right. So it's the genetic fallacy of who the order comes from. You know, I'm the captain, so you're gonna do when I say jump, you're gonna say how hi. That's great uh if you're there telling the guy to jump. But when you're asleep at three o'clock in the morning, and that cop is out on the street at three o'clock in the morning, you're not telling him to jump. He has to have some internal drive to do the right thing. And you can't have leadership unless you have ethical followership. You can't have just bosses that tell people what to do. You have to inspire people, you have to model it. You know, I'll give uh what I think is kind of a simple-minded example, but it impressed me. I remember sticking around Boston after the marathon bombing. And on the the Friday, it was the day after the tragedy of the MIT officer Sean Collier was killed. Thursday, but yeah. Yeah, he was killed Thursday night, I believe. And then it was Friday.

SPEAKER_02 13:17

Wednesday night, Wednesday night and to Thursday, and then Friday was like, we shut down the city to go get it.

SPEAKER_01 13:24

But on Friday, I was at Watertown at the Armory Mall, the Arsenal Mall in Watertown. And there were hundreds and hundreds of police officers involved in that. They shut the town down, they were doing a house-by-house search looking for the surviving brother. And they brought in a caterer to feed all the cops. I mean, there were hundreds of cops, and there was a big line, kind of the chow line. Everybody was waiting in line to go get something to eat. And uh Ed Davis, who was the the commissioner of Boston PD at that point, I watched him leave the command trailer where they were working and walk to the back of the line and get in the line. And he wasn't going to eat until every one of his personnel that were out working had gotten something to eat. And and I I mentioned the guy in front of me, I said, you know, you want to know what leadership looks like? That's what leadership looks like. He's gonna make sure that the people doing the job are getting fed and getting adequate water. Then he'll pill eat when they're done. And the guy in front of me says, you know, I'm in line waiting to get my boss's meal. And I thought that was just great because he used the word boss. I said, Yeah, yeah, okay. So so you can be his waiter. Yeah, exactly. So in in law enforcement today, I think we have a lot of people that are visionary, but you can't get your vision implemented unless the men and women are willing to do that for you. And you can't do that by burning out people, pissing them off, and and being vilified by them. And true leaders are understand most of the time the answers come from the from the people doing the job in the trenches. And you just have to synthesize that information and put it into your vision. So you you can't abuse rank and file personnel. And when you do that, you're you're just a boss.

Burnout As Overcommitment

SPEAKER_02 15:31

Just a quick break, guys. I'm gonna talk about a new product that I really like. I actually bought one of their hoodies, it was amazing, and I really enjoyed wearing it. Uh this episode is gonna be supported by Deemed Fit. Deemed Fit is a first responder-owned activewear and a leisure brand. And one thing that I genuinely like about them is that they support different causes. I actually gave a few people I know who work with first responders, our nonprofits, their name to uh Deemed Fit, and I know they're talking to them. They do a lot of initiatives and collections that are based on mental health for first responders. And if you go there right now and you buy anything, including the mental health support stuff, use the code RDA15. That's right, R D A 15 to get 15% off on any products that you get. Again, it's called RDA15. Go to dfit.com, D-E-E, M-E-D-F-I-T.com, and enjoy 15% off at checkout to save. Now, right back to the episode. And you know, we we have enough bosses, right? Yeah. I think that that's the other part, too, is that I find that there's a toxicity that can exist in some leadership that becomes like suddenly you have bars and your shit don't sink.

SPEAKER_01 16:46

Well, you know, you have to remember many of those people who get promoted are as victimized by the policing experience uh as the rank and file guy who doesn't get promoted. And and they just take that with them. But you know, the the big issue that I look at in police work is burnout. You know, any anybody can be a sprinter. You know, anybody can be a sprinter. I I've I've run the Boston Marathon a dozen times, and I'm always amazed at watching guys take off out there from Hopkinton, and then they're just racing, and then you get somewhere, oh, about Wellesley or someplace like that, and they're bent over on the side of the road, and you hear somebody coming along keeping their pace, and they just bust up Heartbreak Hill, and they they race it into Boston, and you know, and then they're done. So burnout is the syndrome of overcommitment that leads to underproductivity. And cops, young cops, there's nothing more enthusiastic than a young cop. They want to get out on the street, they want to do their job, they're engaged. It's very easy to get a young cop to come to work. They want to come to work. It has almost a recreational quality in most agencies. I'm I'm sure right now there's there's some some of these large American cities that the cops would just assume not. I don't know that, but I I assume because their working conditions are so miserable. Uh, but in in most communities, I I speak at police academies. I see these young kids, they're no different. You know, they they might spend a lot of time on their cell phones and digital devices, but they're they're the same as cops have always been. They want to go out and do a do the job. If there's something hot, a hot call coming down, they want to be part of it. And it's very committed. But unless they know how to maintain themselves and keep those other functions in their life going, they'll they'll end up after about eight or ten years a casualty of the job. Not not even including trauma. You don't have to have the trauma, you just have to have the commitment that becomes overcommitment.

SPEAKER_02 18:56

I I I wrote that symptom of burnout is a symptom of overcommitment. I I think that's a great point. I think that there's most people who go into this field, they want to do something. They don't want to just sit at a desk, they want to be doing something, but that overcommitment can play a factor. You talk about the some the leadership that plays a factor too. And it's also realizing how to be a good mentor. And I know that that's a word that's probably not used as much in the first responder world and particularly police than we do in my job. But I think that even in my job, it's been loss, and you you're a clinical psychologist, you know that. I think to me, having the best, having a mentor, you can have a FTO or field training officer, that's great. But having a mentor, I think is another great way to avoid burnout and also feel validated or supported, or hey, you need a slap in the face because you're doing stupid stuff.

Coaching Mentors And Warning Signs

Cynicism From Officer Safety Mindset

SPEAKER_01 19:53

You know, I've worked with some agencies that don't use the word mentor, they don't use the word field training officer, they use the word coach, and I kind of like that. Okay. Because you, as a coach, your job is to make that player be the absolute best player they can be and and and direct them, guide them, and get them into the game. And again, it falls back. We spend too much time in the short goal. You have to, you know, you can't be a theorist if you're a cop. You got to call to answer, you got calls holding, but we have to know what are we doing to maintain that this guy is still going to be a good cop five years from right now, 10 years from right now. Over the decades, I've had an awful lot of interaction with cops that have been sent to me for fitness for duty evaluations or counseling or something, whatever. And they'll always say, you know what? I used to bust my ass for this department. I used to lead this agency in DUI arrest. I had more arrests than anybody else in the agency. Not anymore. I don't do shit anymore. The more you do around here, the more you get screwed with. I handle my calls. That's all I do. I don't do shit beyond that. Because let me tell you, Doc, you never get in trouble for the traffic stop you didn't make. And that's what it sounds like. That's what the cop who's burning out and is going down a down a treacherous road is sounds like. That's the first step into police corruption. It's an act of omission. You see someplace you need to take policing services, and you don't. You you go the other way and you don't get involved. And when you have a an entire agency that corrupts by acts of omission, the community's not served. No. And that's keeping cops centered and understanding what's going on in their life is terribly important. And I I look at this maybe from a very sort of different perspective than a lot of people do. Most mental health people. my experience over the years, look at what's happening to the police as psychological consequences of their job. I look at it as the biological consequences. If I ask most cops what's the most important skill you have, the most important skill set they'll typically say officer safety. Having street smarts, being able to go handle a call, handle it safely, and come home to your loved ones. And I I couldn't agree more with them. And that's the skill set that we teach from day one at the police academy. We teach officer safety, which we should teach. But we have to take a look at what what is officer safety. Officer safety is looking at every situation from a distrust perspective. It's looking at every potential event that could go wrong and derailing it before it goes wrong. If you stop me tonight and you ask for my driver's license and I say I'll get it for you and I reach for the glove box of my vehicle and you let me reach for the glove box without stopping that, you're not practicing good officer safety. Because to you my actions are always a question mark. You don't know what I'm doing and you have to interpret it as the worst possible thing it could be. And if a good officer safety prone cop is doing two things. They're seeing everything through a distrust perspective. Everything's from you trust gets cops killed. Distrust keeps cops alive. So if you don't know what I'm doing you're gonna you're gonna situate where I stand, where you stand, you're gonna wash my hands, you're not gonna take anything for granted. And that becomes an orientation that's basically cynicism because cynicism is distrust of human nature and motive but the cop has to do it from a biologically elevated perspective of alertness. And in our book we call this hypervigilance the cop has to be extremely vigilant, watchful. They can't be asleep at the wheel and when a cop is highly alert they're pushing their brain into this elevated level of hypervigilance which is the sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system. So every day when the cop leaves they have this homeostatic opposite response they go from high sympathetic to profound parasympathetic detached isolated disengaged. And the cop isn't trained in this so that it's what happens after work that's actually more damaging to the cop because they drop into this depressive like state and they stop talking. They stop socializing they don't socialize because pretty soon they're viewing everything from a perspective of distrust and you know the the the other people in the community are not cops so they pretty soon become assholes in the cops perspective. And so the cop goes to work very good cop comes home and as the years progress these dominoes get knocked over they're not going to the gym as much as they used to go to the gym. They're not going to church as much as they used to go to church. They're not socializing. And I think it's harder now because we have this this huge infusion of social media and digital entertainment so the cop can go out do good police work then come home and just get lost in the digital world and you do this for about 10 years and you've put on about 15 pounds you're not sleeping and you're you're kind of pissed off and but you still have this heavy engagement in your in your work and that that's where we start seeing the families crumble and health starts crumbling yeah that's what but it all starts with something very valuable officer safety if you're gonna teach somebody street survival skills you have to teach them emotional survival skills.

The After Shift Parasympathetic Drop

SPEAKER_02 26:10

You can't have one without the other it's an interesting point because I agree with you. That's what I was going to say is that we talk about like officer safety and I think that the part of officer safety that gets neglected the most is the mental health safety that goes with that. And mental health safety can include physical health things like sleeping making sure all and one of the things that comes up a lot with my guys is the all or nothing thinking process. You know and then you break they can't let their parasympathetic kind of cancel that out when they go home. So they're always all or nothing. I'm not a post all or nothing at work but it is exhausting. So that's why you need to let it go once you leave work. It's absolutely exhausting.

Cortisol Glucose And Type 2 Diabetes

SPEAKER_01 26:54

And it's biochemical too it's exhausting subjectively we feel the exhaustion but what's happening is when an officer practices officer safety they push their brain in this elevated level of alertness. What's happening there is your cortisol secretions really increase. The cortisol hits the liver the liver releases blood glucose that blood glucose is the energy that the young cop feels when they're out doing their job that cortisol induced glucose dump the blood glucose level is elevated but the body has learned the pancreas kicks out insulin which grabs a bunch of this blood glucose and it takes it outside the metabolic process and it infuses it in the lipid cells around the abdominal area. It's kind of like don't burn up all your fuel but keep some of your powder dry because we don't know how long this threat is going to last.

SPEAKER_02 27:53

And there's the military guy talking I just heard it keep your powder dry.

SPEAKER_01 27:58

Well it's just it's just it the you know it's the same as the cop loads their weapon but they also take extra magazines in case it's a protracted threat. Well your body does the same thing under stress it stores blood glucose and the fat cells around the abdominal area bears do this prior to hibernation a bear is twice as fat at the end of October as the bear is at the beginning of October even if the bear doesn't get food it's all done by the infusion of glucose. The problem with this is that glucose receptor is not meant to be used every day the the one that lets the the glucose transition across the cellular wall it's only meant to happen seasonally in the winter as we prepare for as all mammals do this preparing for winter the cop does it every single day. So after eight 10 years there's damage to the glucose receptor and that blood glucose remains in the bloodstream and the cop starts marching towards type 2 diabetes they start with you know borderline diabetic processes then bang now they're 40 45 and they're diagnosed as type 2 diabetic and it's this progression is is is so so predictable and so preventable but we don't we retire the cop after 25 years of service and at this point the cop is on metformin a medication for diabetic treatment and at that point that officer's dealing with an elevated risk of death by stroke or heart disease that we could have clearly prevented if we were looking at genuine wellness and it starts with practicing officer safety daily most people are not in a hypervigilant state every day they go to work and they can be relaxed and it's another day in paradise you're doing that as a cop you're not safe. You're gonna miss the threats so that when I when I talk about the biology of of stress that that's what and an officer's wellness that's that's how I'm conceptualizing it.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

Well I think we got to continue this conversation I mean do you mind staying around for another half hour so yes we'll just end this episode right now we're gonna get you to the other side please like subscribe and follow this podcast on your favorite platform a glowing review is always helpful and as a reminder this podcast is for informational educational and entertainment purposes only if you're struggling with a mental health or substance abuse issue please reach out to the professional counselor for consultation if you are in a mental health crisis for assistance this number is available in the United States and Canada