Fire Service Operations
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It’s Not The Calls: Firefighter Mental Health and Organizational Leadership
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It’s Not The Calls: Firefighter Mental Health and Organizational Leadership
My fire service colleague, Dena Ali, a battalion chief with the Raleigh (N.C.) Fire Department “hits the nail on the head” with one of her latest articles in Fire Engineering magazine, <b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; color: var(–bb-body-text-color);”>It’s Not The Calls: Firefighter Mental Health and Organizational Leadership. Here’s how she opens the piece:
In his opening address to attendees of FDIC International 2023, Chief David Rhodes hit a home run with his remarks on mental health:
“There has really been little focus on the mental health effects of poor leadership. We tend to talk about PTSD because we can blame that on an incident beyond our control. But we don’t want to talk about the root cause of the MAJORITY of the stress that causes us issues: organizational vindictiveness, discrimination, favoritism, and exclusion.” – Chief David Rhodes
fireengineering.com
It's Not The Calls: Firefighter Mental Health and Organizational Leadership
When we are unable to address our true sources of pain, healing remains elusive. Dena Ali considers the mental health impacts of bad leaders.
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2 Replies
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Chiefs Ali and Rhodes have truly brought this topic into the open. When I got in to public safety over 38 years ago, I knew that I was going to see bad things and do hard things. What I did not expect was the way that I would be treated. I went into it knowing that I was expected to risk my life to save others and potentially see horrific incidents. It seemed that the more time I had on the job the worse the non-incident related events would impact me. Sometimes it was the lack of caring that I felt from supervisors and management, others it was the impact of injuries and fatalities of my friends, eventually it was standing up and trying to do the right thing for my subordinates and calling attention to the challenges they faced, only to be told that they just “needed to suck it up.” The balancing act of keeping meat in the seats and the wheels rolling against the challenges of stress, fatigue, behavioral health and family issues was very real as a leader. I made a commitment to error on the side of the employee whenever I could but that was often in conflict with my superiors. This placed me in the crosshairs of management, some who had forgotten what it was like to be in the field or even had little field time themselves. That betrayal was real and damaging.
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Rick,
Thank you for sharing what was obviously stressful to you as an individual and prime example of an organization that was severely lacking in the “psychological safety” department. I’m grateful that you “found” FSPA because I think input and participation from fire service leaders is just as critical to our efforts to “build a bridge between professional psychology and the fire service” as that from our psychologists and masters-level clinicians. I hope that you’ll be able to join in on the Monthly Kitchen Table Meeting next week on January 18th beginning at 10:00 am PST / 1:00 pm EST.
Robert
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