"I am ruined now": Police officers’ perceptions and experiences of mental health, trauma and support

Abstract

Policing is an inherently high-risk occupation, exposing officers to daily trauma, violence, and distressing incidents (Miller et al., 2018). Not surprisingly, previous studies have examined the psychological well-being of police officers. These studies have investigated the prevalence of mental health problems, the impact on officers, and how they cope with these challenges. Although valuable insights have emerged from these studies, they also have significant limitations. First, they are predominantly quantitative, thus unable to fully capture the nature of the traumatic experiences to which officers are exposed, how they understand and respond to such events, and the nature of their help-seeking behaviours. Second, we know little about officers’ mental health in high-risk security environments. To address these gaps, this dissertation conducted face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with 60 police officers in Northern Ireland, a high-risk policing environment. A thematic analysis of the data showed that the most frequently cited traumatic events were “baby deaths” or incidents involving children. The significance of these events did not arise from their objective severity but from officers’ identification with the victims. Second, a typology is developed based on the officers’ accounts of the meanings of the events to their well-being: fragility, deferred fragility, resilience, or antifragility. Third, officers perceived institutional support systems as perfunctory and inefficient, often describing them as “arse-covering”. Officers feared stigma and professional repercussions if they disclosed mental health problems, which contributed to moral injury/post-traumatic embitterment disorder. The thesis concludes with a reflection on the scholarly and policy implications of the findings.