Post-Traumatic Stress in Georgia Law Enforcement: Prevalence, Associations with Barriers to Help Seeking and Quality of Life, and the Modifying Effect of Environmental Exposure

Objective: Post-traumatic stress symptoms may negatively impact law enforcement performance and skew judgment in a high-stress dangerous situation, leading to an inappropriate response. The purpose of this study was fivefold: 1) to determine the prevalence of self-reported post-traumatic stress symptoms; 2) to identify associations between demographics and environmental exposures with post-traumatic stress symptoms, barriers to help seeking, and quality-of-life; 3) to examine the relationship between barriers to help seeking and self-reported post-traumatic stress symptoms overall, and by environment; 4) to explore the impact of environment on the relationship between barriers to help seeking and quality-of-life; and 5) to ascertain if the association between post-traumatic stress symptoms and quality-of-life was modified by environment among law enforcement in this sample. Methods: An anonymous questionnaire consisting of basic demographics, the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) Checklist- Civilian Version (PCL-C), Barriers to Help Seeking Scale (BHSS), Short Form 12 Health Survey (SF-12) was distributed to sworn law enforcement officers. Completed questionnaires were assessed to determine: self-reported post-traumatic stress symptom prevalence; the demographic and environmental associations with post-traumatic stress symptoms, barriers to help seeking, and quality-of-life; and, the impact of environment on the associations between post-traumatic stress symptoms, barriers to help seeking, and quality-of-life. Results: Self-reported post-traumatic stress symptom prevalence reached approximately 40%. In the weighted whole sample and in the unweighted environmental subgroups, BHSS scores and PCL-C scores were significantly positively correlated in almost all conditions, and both BHSS total scores and SF-12 scores, and PCL-C scores and SF-12 scores, were significantly negatively correlated in the majority of conditions. Conclusions: Demographics and environment had significant impacts on the outcome variables ...