Is Policing Itself Harming Officers’ Mental Health?
Policing has become increasingly aware of the psychological impact of the incidents officers attend. Research by former police officer and social scientist Mark Brain suggests that this focus is important, but may leave another significant source of poor mental health receiving far less attention: the officer's experience of the organisation itself.
When we think about trauma in policing, it is usually associated with operational experiences. Officers encounter sudden deaths, suicides, serious violence, abuse, fatal collisions and distressing incidents involving children, sometimes repeatedly over many years. The potential psychological consequences are well recognised, and considerable effort has rightly gone into encouraging officers to recognise when those experiences are affecting them and to seek support.
There is a risk, however, in assuming that exposure to traumatic incidents provides the main explanation whenever a police officer becomes mentally unwell.
That assumption was examined by Mark Brain as part of his doctoral research at Cardiff University. Mark, who previously served as a warranted police officer, conducted 86 unstructured narrative interviews with serving and retired officers. His research allowed participants to describe their lives and careers broadly rather than concentrating solely on particular traumatic incidents.
What emerged was a much more complicated picture.
Mark reports that his analysis "overwhelmingly identified" organisational relationships as having negatively affected participants' mental health more than the episodic traumatic incidents they had experienced while carrying out police work. His conclusion does not dismiss operational trauma, which remained capable of causing serious harm, but challenges the idea that it should automatically be treated as the dominant explanation for poor mental health within policing.
The distinction is particularly important because organisational pressures can be much harder to recognise as potentially harmful. There may be no single incident that explains why an officer is struggling. Instead, their mental health may deteriorate over months as they lose control over aspects of their working life, experience difficulties with management, become isolated during an internal investigation, feel unable to ask for help or gradually lose their connection with policing.
Mark's analysis identified four recurring themes within participants' experiences: organisational control, internal Professional Standards investigations, organisational masculinity, and disconnecting or becoming disconnected from policing. Although each involved different circumstances, they shared an important characteristic because the source of the pressure came from within the officer's professional environment rather than from the public they were policing.
That difference may help explain why organisational problems can be particularly difficult for some officers. Police officers generally join knowing that they will encounter distressing situations, even if the reality can never be fully understood until they experience it. They may not expect the organisation they have invested years of their life in to become a significant source of anxiety or insecurity.
It also creates a challenge for the way police wellbeing is approached. If an officer is struggling after exposure to traumatic incidents, appropriate psychological treatment, counselling and occupational health support may help them process those experiences. If their distress is being driven by an ongoing organisational situation, the same support may help them cope while leaving the underlying problem untouched.
Mark acknowledges the value of counselling and cognitive therapies, but argues that they can become reactive when organisational causes are not addressed. An officer experiencing severe anxiety during a prolonged workplace process, for example, may benefit from psychological support, but that support cannot provide an outcome, restore lost certainty or change the process itself.
None of this means that every difficult management decision is harmful, that every officer who becomes unwell has been failed by their force, or that operational trauma has been overstated. Mark's research was principally based on one anonymised case-study force and was not designed to provide a statistically representative picture of every police officer in the country. Further research is needed to establish how widely the organisational mechanisms he identified are experienced elsewhere.
The research does, however, give policing good reason to widen the conversation. We have become better at asking officers whether the things they have seen are affecting them. Perhaps we also need to become better at asking whether the way they are being managed, investigated, supported and treated by their own organisation is affecting them too.
Recognising organisational harm does not weaken policing or diminish the importance of operational trauma. It simply acknowledges that protecting the mental health of officers requires us to examine the whole working environment, including the parts of policing that policing itself has the power to change.