Traumatic Stress Among Emergency Service Personnel:Investigating Early Intervention and Help-seeking Behaviours

Emergency service personnel such as police officers, firefighters, rescue workers and paramedics experience significant job-related stressors and potentially traumatic incidents. This inevitable exposure to trauma puts them at a high risk of developing negative physical and psychological outcomes. There is a vast array of literature on the psychological distress due to being on the frontlines in these professions, such as: acute stress, anxiety and depression, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and even suicide. This thesis aims to investigate traumatic stress among emergency service personnel with a specific focus on early interventions and help-seeking behaviours, in order to inform and improve trauma risk management strategies. It endeavors to realize this aim by: i) critically reviewing the literature on efficacy of PD for emergency service personnel, ii) exploring the lived experiences of PD by a major emergency service personnel group— police officers, to decipher whether they found PD helpful or not and what factors affected the efficacy of the intervention, iii) analyzing and describing the trauma induced help-seeking behaviours among another major first responder group—firefighters, and finally iv) providing recommendations that have the potential to improve trauma risk management strategies among the researched populations. Each of these objectives are briefly discussed below. There is a significant amount of research on preventative early interventions and support services for this at-risk population. However, there is a lot of confusion around the most commonly used early trauma-focused intervention—psychological debriefing (PD). A Cochrane review on PD concluded it to be ineffective, however, many emergency services in the US and Europe have continued to implement adaptations of PD despite the contentions in academia. This dissertation firstly examines this inconsistency between research evidence and practice by critically assessing the Cochrane review. It then qualitatively examines PD among ...