Dr Sian Williams: Why it’s critical we protect the emotional wellbeing of the police
With one police officer dying by suicide approximately every two and a half weeks, we must look after those who put themselves in harm’s way
The Prince of Wales with Sian Williams talking to staff during a visit to the Milton Keynes Blue Light Hub CREDIT: Joe Giddens/Pool via REUTERS
Daily Telegraph 1st November 2023
I first became aware of the emotional impact of life as a police officer over a decade ago, when I met PC David Rathband while presenting BBC Breakfast. David had been on duty as an unarmed traffic officer in Northumberland in 2010 when a gunman, Raoul Moat, crept up on his car. Moat, who’d talked of “hunting for officers”, shot David twice at close range, rendering him blind and leaving him with hundreds of shotgun pellets lodged in his skull. The interview had focused on David’s bravery and recovery, but he wanted to do another one for BBC Radio 4 to talk about the psychological effect of what had happened and promote a charity he’d set up, supporting injured emergency workers.
We arranged to talk the day before the London Marathon, which David was running sightless, tethered to a support partner, to raise funds for his Blue Lamp charity. It was a deeply personal interview. David spoke of the darkness he was experiencing, that he felt Raoul Moat had been on his shoulder every step during training, but he just couldn’t out-run him. He said he felt less of a father and husband since the shooting, that his police uniform was still hanging in the wardrobe, but he didn’t know when he’d put it on again. While he couldn’t see me, he occasionally reached for my hand when he became tearful, or he’d touch his face, worrying at one of the pellets still embedded in his cheek.
Afterwards, I asked him whether he was comfortable with the interview being edited and played out to millions on the radio. He said yes. He wanted people to know that life on the frontline carried mental as well as physical risks. David ran his race, the charity raised thousands of pounds, our conversation made the Radio Times’s Top 20 greatest broadcast interviews list [1]. Less than a year later, David took his own life.
There are often complex reasons behind a suicide and the only person who really knows why they end things is, tragically, not around to ask. But latest figures from the Office for National Statistics suggest that in England and Wales, a serving police officer dies by suicide approximately every two and a half weeks. And the Police Federation of England and Wales reports that one in five officers has post traumatic stress disorder and more than 13,000 officers were off work because of PTSD, stress, depression and/or anxiety, that’s around 10 per cent of the force.
It takes a lot for an officer to go off sick, or to ask for help. It reminds me of journalism, where I’ve spent nearly 40 years of my career. The idea that the tough stuff is part of the job, that there’s little time to sit around and reflect, that no one wants to hear your troubles because they’ve got enough of their own. I retrained to become a Chartered Counselling Psychologist partly to help my colleagues who were struggling with the traumatic effects of the job. Now, I also work for the NHS, as part of a small team at the Centre for Anxiety, Stress and Trauma, offering support to police staff, ambulance workers and firefighters.
The job of journalists and the emergency services are often spiked with tragedy. The former witness it, the latter must deal with it. Both can be affected, and both can find it hard to seek and access support. “You’ve got to man up,” one female police officer told me. “No one asks how you’re doing, and you can’t bring it home to the family, so it just builds and builds until one day, you can’t do it anymore.”
Another had come to see me for therapy and, after just a few sessions, we were opening boxes containing so many furies, they seemed to leap out and darken the room. A car crash where she held the dying body of a boy, who’d just passed his driving test. A post-mortem of a girl who reminded her strongly of a family member. An exhumation of a young victim of murder. This was all part of the normal procedure, she told herself, but none of it was being processed in her mind.
Horrific experiences just kept piling up until she was, she says, “massively spiralling out of control”. She had “zero clue” that she had post-traumatic stress disorder, or that officers like her could suffer with it. She says she is “amazed and overwhelmed” at how therapy and support has helped and wanted to be part of this article because she knows that, while it’s not easy, psychological injuries can heal. Not everyone will experience what she went through but think of the cumulative effect of the job. The average civilian might see three or four highly traumatic events in a lifetime: police officers typically see up to 600 in their career.
A couple of weeks ago, I joined Prince William at the Milton Keynes Blue Light Hub, the operational base of the South Central Ambulance Service, Thames Valley Police and Buckinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service, to meet young emergency responders at the start of their careers. The Prince of Wales is passionate about supporting the mental health of the emergency services community and knows very well the potential challenges, having served himself as both an Air Ambulance and RAF search-and-rescue pilot. He asked the group how they were looking after their emotional wellbeing and they spoke about the values that took them into the service, the protective effect of a close team or family, the crucial role of a compassionate manager. It’s a rewarding job, they said, but to do it well, we need mental health support. Prince William agrees.
Two years ago, together with the Royal Foundation, he hosted the first Emergency Services Mental Health Symposium, which brought together services from all four nations. There was a commitment to support mental wellbeing at work along with the launch of Blue Light Together, a hub with specialist support and resources for emergency responders and their families.
Today, I’m hosting the third Symposium in Manchester, where we continue that work. Responders, charities and professionals will share ideas and discuss how to properly look after those who save and protect us. Emergency workers run towards danger when we run away and then they do it again, the very next day. They are often the glue that binds fragile communities together, they offer strength and support to those at their most vulnerable and distressed. We need them to be resilient and we need them to access mental-health support quickly if they’re struggling.
We can all look with hindsight at those we’ve lost and wonder if there was more that could have been done, but the coroner at PC Rathband’s inquest implored people not to do that. What I do know, having spent the past eighteen months working with those who are regularly putting themselves in harm’s way, is that we have a duty to look after and support them. Only then, can they safely do their duty of looking after and supporting us.
Dr Sian Williams is a Chartered Counselling Psychologist, working for the Centre for Anxiety, Stress and Trauma (CAST) at the Central and North West London (CNWL) NHS Trust. The fee for this article is being donated to PC David Rathband’s Blue Lamp Foundation.