Senior leaders should not judge people with mental illness

SENIOR leaders in policing need to move away from judging and blaming those in the service who suffer from mental health illnesses and start taking responsibility for the issue.

That was the message from NPCC Lead for Organisational Development and Wellbeing, Deputy Chief Constable Andy Rhodes, when he addressed Chief Superintendents and Superintendents at their Annual Conference.

He told them that the health of police officers was not a “pink and fluffy” matter.

DCC Rhodes said “one of the big issues” in 2017 in the service would be post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He said: “Our understanding of PTSD, how it affects how we do our job, not just the negative aspects of it but how we can look at PTSD as something that, actually, is quite normal given what we expose a lot of our staff and ourselves to over the series of our service.”

Neil Bowles, Chairman of South Yorkshire Police Federation, added: “Forces’ occupational health units have been set up but they do not have enough staff or resources to cope at the best of times, let alone when the going gets tough such as here in South Yorkshire.

“The amount of officers that are off sick with stress has increased, and I have evidence that some musculoskeletal issues are indeed caused by stress.”

There has been a 14% increase over the last financial year in the number of UK police officers signed off work for mental health-related illnesses, including stress, anxiety, depression PTSD.

A total of 8,632 officers were signed off work in the past year for these illnesses in 39 forces in England and Wales, Police Scotland, the PSNI and British Transport Police.

That’s around one in 17 police officers in the UK. And it is an increase of 14% from comparable forces for the 2014/15 financial year.

“The first thing is that this problem has always been there,” DCC Rhodes told the Superintendents’ Association Annual Conference.

“It is coming out more visibly now because there are less back office jobs, there are less places where people who weren’t well used to go to do their work and see their police careers out.

“We are learning that some people think that wellbeing is still pink and fluffy and that’s because, for them, they don’t understand the severity of what we’re talking about within wellbeing. The term itself is a little bit pink and fluffy, I prefer to use the word ‘resilience’.

“I think PTSD will sharpen our awareness of what wellbeing is about and early intervention, but in terms of what we’ve learned over the last sort of couple of years, resilience, or people struggling with resilience has been managed away and not dealt with.

“We’ve defaulted to process rather than a conversation and we have engaged in a lot of things that on the surface looked like they’re fixing the problem but in reality aren’t. And there is a lot of money spent in the service that could be spent differently around more targeted early intervention approaches to our resilience.”

DCC Rhodes spoke of “employee assistance programmes” that some forces outsource to support officers and staff. He said that many require a line manager to initiate the intervention.

“Quite often it might be the line manager who is part of the problem that’s going on,” he added.

DCC Rhodes concluded his session, titled “Command resilience and wellbeing”, by stating that “it’s good to talk.”