An assessment of mental health challenges and occupational stressors among public safety personnel senior leadership
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Substantial evidence indicates frontline public safety personnel (PSP), including, but not limited to firefighters, paramedics, and police, report significantly more occupational stressors, mental health challenges, and suicidal behaviours than the general population, largely attributed to their public service. In contrast, there is a paucity of research assessing the mental health of PSP serving in senior leadership roles (i.e., Chiefs, Directors, or Deputy Chiefs). The current study assessed prevalence proportions of occupational stressors, mental health challenges, and suicidal behaviours among paramedics and police serving in senior leadership relative to PSP in other roles within the organization. Participants included Canadian paramedics and police officers (n = 3717). Independent samples t-tests were conducted to assess for differences in mean mental health disorder symptom and occupational stressor scores between professional roles (i.e., PSP senior leadership vs other serving PSP) within PSP sectors. Bootstrapped logistic regression models tested for differences in relative risk for screening positive for mental health disorders and suicidal behaviours, and a series of bootstrapped partial point biserial correlations tested for associations between individual occupational stressors and screening positive for any mental health disorder. Despite differences in occupational demands, responsibilities, individual organizational, and operational stressors between the roles, there were very few statistically significant differences between serving PSP and their senior leadership. PSP senior leadership may face specific barriers to accessing care as a function of their highly visible positions and relatively limited options for peer support. Additional research is needed to understand the contemporary mental health and wellbeing needs of PSP senior leadership.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".