Wednesday, 6 April 2016

Police officer Commits suicide



The Police Service in Calgary, Canada is mourning the death of one of its Police officers, and talking about the services available to help its members. 
"I think it's really important to say that police officers are human beings and we come with all the frailties that human beings come with," said Nina Vaughan, the superintendent of the employee services division.
 "We suffer stress in our family life and in our work life the same as every other citizen does."

"I think that people don't really know when you join policing, the degree to which you'll be impacted by the things that we see every day and the sort of cumulative effect of that."
Reducing the stigma
Every employee has been through training to be able to detect stresses in co-workers and feel comfortable talking about mental health, which Vaughan hopes has removed, or at least reduced, the stigma around mental health. 
"It's easier to have a conversation about it when everyone's talking the same way and when everybody recognizes the signs of stress and is trained in the signs of stress for their peer group, so we can look out for each other and we can look out for our employees," said Vaughan.
She said it's "relatively rare" for a member of the service to take their own life, with four suicides in the past 25 years. 
Police are not discussing the particulars of this case or whether it had anything to do with stress from work, and Vaughan said she doesn't know enough about it to say whether things could have been done differently or not. 

No comments: