Talking about it is the first step
By Megan Haynes
“Loneliness, like your back is at the wall and there is nobody to turn to.”So Cst. Luc Touchette turned to alcohol.
“At first it was to help me sleep at night. To try and stop the nightmares,” he says. “ Then I [drank] to forget why I wasn’t preforming at work. It got exaggerated in all sense of the word. It was my life.”
Touchette first started experiencing problems after he was involved in a car accident. He didn’t break any bones, but he says he went back to work a few weeks later and he had changed. He says he felt his service wasn’t up-to-par, and he had trouble focusing. He says he started handing in work late and was overly angry with suspects.
“I felt like a rookie. My work meant nothing to me,” he says. “I used to be proud of it. But not anymore.”
“I came home, I didn’t want to do anything. I wanted to sleep, I wanted to drink.”
It wasn’t until he was hospitalized for his depression did the doctors tell him he has post-traumatic stress disorder.
Psychologist Dr Brian Hindmarch, who’s been working with members since 1985, says the nature of an officer’s job makes them more susceptible to depression or other mental traumas.
“Nobody calls the police when good stuff happens,” he says. “Police deal with violence, they deal with death, they deal with injury, they deal with the horrific side of society that the rest of the public doesn’t have to deal with. That, by definition, is stressful. And when people are exposed to extraordinary high levels of stress, then they need to have some way to deal with that.”
It wasn’t until Touchette ended up in the hospital for his depression did he realize he needed to dig himself out of his hole of depression.
“At first I did everything the doctors told me to do: go for a walk, be more active, meet people. I had a fear of large, open environments, and I had to face that. These were baby steps,” he says.
“The first thing to do is to talk to somebody and try and sort it out,” says Hindmarch. He says if it can be caught early enough, usually a simple treatment plan can be set up. Catching it late can mean more extensive psychotherapy or even medication.
“It does not go away by itself. It becomes worse,” he says. Touchette’s drinking is not isolated. Indeed, substance abuse can become a real problem for members with depression.
He says members and friends should be on the lookout for any sort of change in someone’s personality.
“Changes in mood. Changes in the way in which they interact with people. Changes in eating and sleeping patterns. People with post-traumatic stress disorder tend to have recurring, intrusive recollections and dreams about specific incidents,” he says.
Spotting the symptoms
“The hardest part about it, was that it never ends,” says SRR Gilles Blinn (J Division) “It’s a perpetual cycle of darkness. I got tired of being tired.”
He was involved in a car accident and learned later he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury. “My wires were all crossed,” he says. “I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t concentrate. I couldn’t remember significant names or dates in my life. I was irritable, grumpy and sometimes irrational.”
He remembers once driving through town and having to fight down the urge to beat up a kid who had given him the finger.
His own children were too much to handle sometimes.
“I had no patience to deal with them. I had 4-year-old twins, a 6- and a 12-year old, and they drove me nuts. When they would play, do kid things, be loud or rambunctious, it confused me,” he said. “They went through hell.”
But it took almost getting into another car accident to make him realize something was wrong.
“I saw a red light, and I couldn’t process it right away, so I ran it,” he says. “I was a hair away from colliding with another car.”
At a certain point, members can become a danger to themselves or others if their depression or mental illness is not caught, says Hindmarch.
Blinn says he had to be pulled from active duty, which was one of the hardest things he’s had to deal with.
“I was a traffic cop, traffic oriented,” he says. “I had a very promising career, and they put me behind a desk.”
He sought help, and his wife, who is a psychiatric nurse, was able to help him as well. But this was one of the main reasons he joined the SRR Program.
“We train our members in standard first aid, but we have a lack of general understanding about the issue,” he says. “It’s an epidemic and we don’t realize it.”
In fact, Gilles says there is still a stigma attached to psychological illnesses, which can sometimes lead to harassment and discrimination.
“We’ve gotten better, but we still have a long way to go,” he says.
“John Wayne-types and macho men don’t need to talk” stigma
Dr. Matt Logan, a recently retired member with a PhD in psychology, served on the Force for 28 years. People would go to him to talk, and he would often refer people to other psychologists.
“We need to develop a climate within policing where depression is normalized.”
While the RCMP has made enormous strides in recent years, Logan says much of the hesitation to receive treatment is the stigma attached to getting help and medication.
“I think [the acceptance] comes from senior officers being more open about it,” he says. But he adds: “I still think it exists. I think we’ve demystified it a bit. We didn’t’ know what it looked like to go through it before. But the idea that you’re ‘damaged goods’ still prevails to a certain extent.”
Catching it early is important, he says. When it’s ignored or pushed to the side, it can be deadly.
One incident sticks out in Logan’s mind. Years back, a member dealing with depression was referred to Logan. They met over coffee, and Logan had convinced the member to go see a psychologist and to discuss the problems more in depth.
“But that night, something happened,” he says. “I guess it was something that pushed him over, and he took his own life. For me personally, it put me back to ‘What ifs?’ What if I had said something more, done something more? What if I could have stopped it?”
Hindmarch says members need to get over their fears of asking if everything is OK.
“Don’t ignore it, don’t pretend it’s not there,” he says.
Touchette says his family helped him get through it. He says he needed to start his life over, learn new ways of doing things, like controlling his anger and dissipating his emotions. Touchette has returned to work part-time, six hours a day. Sometimes he says he still feels he needs a nap in the afternoon to help him cope.
He says one of the hardest parts of his job has been to accept that he needed help, that this was something he needed to recover from, much like a bullet wound or a broken bone.
“I haven’t yet,” he says quietly. “But I want to work full time. I’m stubborn, I just don’t want to quit.”
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