Firefighters Mental Illness

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Pages: 5
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Mental Illness Within The Fire Service
Kathleen Grace Newberry
Wingate University

Abstract
Emergency personnel are faced with responding to disasters on a daily basis. These personnel are specially trained to combat the first wave of a disaster. They play a critical role in everyday life. They provide immediate short-term care during the immediate aftermath of an emergency, yet they remain affected for days, weeks, or even months. They often work long hours under stressful conditions. Emergency personnel experience physical injuries rarely, but most commonly they experience mental injuries. Mental illnesses are easily and frequently overlooked because of the difficulty that goes along with visibly identifying or diagnosing …show more content…
Training with the purpose of keeping all brothers and sisters safe is what that individual will participate in. The heart of every firefighter has a purpose to serve. That firefighter will dedicate blood, sweat, time, and money to fulfill that desire. The fire service strives to eliminate the deaths of their brothers and sisters. It is time to address the predominate killer that is affecting so many: mental …show more content…
They are often overtasked. Firefighters are tasked with pulling the fire hose off the fire truck, operating the nozzle on the end of that hose, chopping or sawing doors or windows, extricating the patient that is trapped in the vehicle, starting CPR on the deceased patient, operating thermal imaging cameras while in a room that is on fire, and they do countless other tasks to accomplish the task that they were assigned. The skills mentioned above take numerous attempts to master. The fire service is constantly coming up with new techniques and the firefighter is responsible for being proficient in the old and new way (Baker 64). Firefighters are not the ones that caused the disaster they are responding to. There is high stress levels in conjunction with not making the situation, which is already bad, worse. Firefighters are expected to offer help unconditionally. They are often taken for granted. They are made to feel that their actions do not really matter and if they were not there, they could easily be replaced. This is a problem because even though they make such a difference, they don’t see it (Laskey 107). A common occurrence that could be to blame for the susceptibility of the firefighters is poor nutrition and exercise (Gist, Taylor, and Raak
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