Mental Health Support for First Responders

Considering Alternative Treatment Options

Prince William, a former air ambulance pilot himself, addressed this message to remote attendees of the annual Emergency Services Festival of Thanksgiving in the United Kingdom in September of 2020.

Even though he was referring to the UK, his statement holds true for first responders worldwide. Especially during Thanksgiving, now is the time to be grateful for how much first responders have helped our communities and to understand the challenges they may face.

First responders are the firefighters, police officers, emergency medical technicians and paramedics that respond to emergencies, accidents, assault and violence, and disasters. The work they do is essential to our communities, but as it is consistently ranked as among the world’s most stressful jobs, they are at a much higher risk of mental health conditions and trauma.

As the first professionals to arrive on what is a commonly dangerous and chaotic scene, a big part of their job is that they must remain calm as they assess situations, make critical decisions, and offer urgent physical and emotional support. Witnessing daily trauma and adhering to the demands of the job puts first responders at a greater risk for severe and lasting mental health issues.

Christi Myers, M.S., EMT-P, has over 20 years of experience in emergency medicine. She knows first-hand the difficulties that first responders face each day.

Myers explains that first responders are trained to be vigilant at all times but the scenes they come across each day puts an incessant emotional impact on their psyche. She says that one of the problems is that the constant mental stimulation and heightened awareness prevents first responders from being able to fully go into a restful state, even once they head home for the day.

Myers explains that ketamine therapy is able to remove that vigilance from the forefront of your mind. Once your mind is quieted, you move from being in a state of constant vigilance to having “moments” of vigilance, so that you can finally start the process of understanding, forgiving, and ultimately, healing.

She says, “You don’t realize how unconscious you are to certain things until you can look through another lens.” For her, the things that she hadn’t been seeing were “how wonderful [her] life truly [was].”

Ketamine is a legal and FDA-approved treatment option at many new clinics around the country, which may offer an alternative option for first responders who are, as Myers describes, “the most self-sacrificing bunch of humans,” and they need to be supported, too.

Janelle Edmondson, MSN, APRN, PMHNP-BC, CCTP/CCTP-II, also works to support first responders and knows about the challenges and lack of resources that first responders have available. She says,

Edmondson is a Certified Complex Trauma Professional (CCTP-I/II) and EMDRIA clinician licensed to offer EMDR and she explains that for her personally, EMDR therapy “has changed [her] life.” She recognizes that there is usually an event that develops a calling to this line of work, and that place is usually trauma as well. She explains that EMDR allows first responders to reprocess significant amounts of trauma in a short period of time, which subsequently also facilitates the process of properly storing those traumatic memories in the brain. According to Edmondson, EMDR therapy decreases stress levels, as well as reduces the occurrence of flashbacks and bad dreams, which are common after traumatic events.

Resolving these traumatic experiences and the occurrence of flashbacks, bad memories, or resulting anxiety and depression helps first responders get back to what they love doing — saving lives.

Myers and Edmondson both integrate Osmind software into with their practices because it allows for personal mood monitoring for the patient as well as private communication between the patient and clinician. Practitioners working with first responders should feel free to reach out to see if the software could be a good fit for their practice.

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