Perceptions of seeking professional mental health support among public safety personnel: Understanding barriers and facilitators for police and firefighters
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Public safety personnel (PSP), including police officers and firefighters, face significant risks of psychological issues due to exposure to traumatic events at work. Nevertheless, obstacles hinder seeking support. Understanding barriers and facilitators is crucial for tailoring interventions, to narrow the gap between need and action in seeking professional mental health support. The aim of this study is to provide a qualitative analysis of perceptions regarding seeking professional mental health support after being exposed to traumatic events at work in these two groups of PSP and identify potential differences between them. Based on 62 participants’ interviews (30 police officers and 32 firefighters), our findings informed us about current barriers to seek professional support as well as potential facilitators in police and firefighters’ organizations in the Quebec province of Canada. Six main themes were identified as barriers to seeking professional support among these PSP: opposing professional culture, accessibility issues, peer judgment, internalized stigma, prioritization of other coping strategies, and lack of self-awareness. Four main themes were identified that could facilitate the call for professional mental health support: organizational commitment, tailored resources, specific training, and peer-normalized attitudes. Some differences were found between the two occupational groups. Identifying barriers and proposing solutions assist organizations in supporting their employees’ mental health, while acknowledging potential differences between occupational groups that underscores the need for tailored support strategies.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".