“Playing the system”: Structural factors potentiating mental health stigma, challenging awareness, and creating barriers to care for Canadian public safety personnel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are growing concerns about the impact of public safety work on the mental health of public safety personnel; as such, we explored systemic and individual factors that might dissuade public safety personnel from seeking care. Public safety personnel barriers to care-seeking include the stigma associated with mental disorders and frequent reports of insufficient access to care. To better understand barriers to care-seeking, we thematically analyzed the optional open-ended final comments provided by over 828 Canadian public safety personnel as part of a larger online survey designed to assess the prevalence of mental disorders among public safety personnel. Our results indicated that systematic processes may have (1) shaped public safety personnel decisions for care-seeking, (2) influenced how care-seekers were viewed by their colleagues, and (3) encouraged under-awareness of personal mental health needs. We described how public safety personnel who do seek care may be viewed by others; in particular, we identified widespread participant suspicion that coworkers who took the time to address their mental health needs were "abusing the system." We explored what constitutes "abusing the system" and how organizational structures-systematic processes within different public safety organizations-might facilitate such notions of abuse. We found that understaffing may increase scrutiny of injured public safety personnel by those left to manage the additional burden; in addition, cynicism and unacknowledged structural stigma may emerge, preventing the other public safety personnel from identifying their mental health needs and seeking help. Finally, we discuss how system-level stigma can be potentiated by fiscal constraints when public safety personnel take any leave of absence, inadvertently contributing to an organizational culture wherein help-seeking for employment-related mental health concerns becomes unacceptable. Implications for public safety personnel training and future research needs are discussed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: yes | Qualitative | low |
| gpt | Science and technology studies Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: yes | Qualitative | medium |
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.037 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
The models disagree on parts of this classification; every voice is preserved in the section at the end of the page.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".