THE BADGE OF LIFE

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We are a group of active and retired police officers, medical professionals and surviving families of suicides from the United States and Canada. We have suffered the worst that posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) brings—the hopelessness, the despair, the flashbacks, the attempts at suicide, the nightmares and insomnia, the panicky hypervigilence, anxiety and terror. Among us are victims of both critical incident and cumulative PTSD. Our families have suffered the loss of a loved one to police suicide.

We found that many departments still lack adequate suicide prevention programs. We found many departments have excellent programs—but need more than "suicide prevention."


	California Highway Patrol Commissioner Joe Farrow discusses police mental health with Badge of Life

Our program came after long discussion and research--and the realization that, in the search for complex answers, we were all missing some of the simple solutions. For that reason, we undertook a two-year study, with Dr, John Violanti of the University of Buffalo, to determine once and for all how many police suicides were happening each year. This put to rest some of the outlandish figures that were being passed around the lecture circuit for far too many years.

Next, making it clear we fully support suicide prevention programs, we made it clear that they represented only one-half of the "solution. To that end, we developed our program of "Emotional Self-Care" (ESC) training for all officers, from the "cradle to the grave, to supplement suicide prevention and keep officers from reaching the point of crisis and suicide in the first place.

We make it clear that everything we do is free. We are a nonprofit and charge nothing for lectures, workshops, educational materials or other assistance. This is what we do.

"It's not just about suicide." It's about mental health for all police officers. Rather than waiting until an officer is in crisis to act, we must begin training our officers in the art of good emotional self-care so that they can keep from getting into crisis in the first place!

The means by which to do that, we realized, was by impressing upon officers that their emotional health, especially in this career, is as important as their physical health and their prowess on the firing range. To that end, we developed a training program that focuses on steering officers in for a "mental health check" with a therapist at least once a year--freely, voluntarily, confidentially.

Academies are not reluctant to encourage recruits to continue 100 - 200 hours of physical conditioning after they graduate. It is time to encourage them also to invest a mere ten percent of that into their emotional conditioning.

WHY? What's in it for you?

Much. Your results will be measured not only in saved costs from replacing dead officers, but in lawsuits, citizen complaints, sick leave, alcoholism, tardiness, grievances, reckless behaviors, and more.

We do not challenge your existing programs, be they suicide prevention, chaplaincy programs, departmental EAP's, psychologists or whatever. We support them and wish to supplement them.

The Board and Staff of Badge of Life

Committing to the ritual of a yearly psych check “forces you to focus on what’s going on in your life, to take stock of yourself and how you’re doing. Without that obligation, when do we take time to evaluate our mental health and our relationships?”