Officer Mental Health: We Need To Spot The Warning Signs

There is help out there for officers who are struggling with their mental health, but more needs to be done to prevent them breaking in the first place, South Yorkshire Police Federation has said.

Chair Steve Kent was speaking after the Home Affairs Select Committee discussed suicide prevention in the police. Andy Rhodes from Oscar Kilo told the Select Committee that it did not yet have full data on the number of police suicides.

PFEW Wellbeing Co-Lead Paul Williams said: “To be able to say in 2024 that we do not monitor our police officers in terms of the suicide or attempted suicide rate is incredible” and that the police service needed to “up its game” at spotting the early warning signs.

Steve said: “Our force has invested in services for people to go to when they’re feeling under pressure. It’s still not perfect because cops don’t always necessarily come forward, so we often rely on colleagues, family and friends to flag things, which thankfully people do. The Federation’s ‘Ask Twice’ campaign is really important on that issue.

“So we do have a basic mechanism in place to deal with officers who are starting to break and who are broken. But what I want to see is to stop them from breaking in the first place.

“Occupational health in our force is completely snowed under. We are picking up the slack with our counsellors, which we’re proud to do, but it can’t be right that we have so many cops who are broken.

“One thing that would help would be to stop the ludicrous performance culture and bureaucracy we’ve got in policing. We need to invest in our numbers, invest in getting resources back, and take the pressure off policing, because at the minute it is off the scale.”

The force doesn’t currently flag up officers who have been to multiple traumatic incidents and who might be at risk of PTSD, Steve added.

He said: “It would be a big challenge to do it, but it could be done. But it requires supervisors and managers to have the support to spend a good period of their time looking after officers and checking up on them. At the moment, supervisors and inspectors are so busy chasing targets that they’re missing it when their cops are struggling.”