When the Organisation Becomes the Stressor
Police officers expect pressure to come with the job. What they may not expect is for the organisation they serve to become one of the things they are struggling to cope with. Research by former police officer and social scientist Mark Brain suggests that this distinction deserves far more attention when we talk about police mental health.
Stress is unavoidable in policing. Officers make decisions with limited information, carry significant responsibility, work unpredictable hours and regularly encounter people experiencing some of the worst moments of their lives. There will always be parts of the profession that are demanding, regardless of how well a police force is run.
Yet not every source of police stress comes from policing the public.
In his doctoral research at Cardiff University, Mark Brain examined the experiences of 86 serving and retired police officers. His analysis found that organisational relationships had negatively affected participants' mental health more than the episodic traumatic incidents they encountered operationally. Rather than identifying one particular organisational problem, Mark found several recurring themes involving control and autonomy, Professional Standards investigations, police culture and the experience of becoming disconnected from the organisation.
This helps distinguish ordinary occupational pressure from something potentially more damaging. A busy response officer may finish a difficult set of shifts exhausted by demand, constant calls and challenging incidents, but organisational stress can involve something different because it can affect how secure that officer feels within the career itself.
Mark uses the concept of "ontological security" to help explain what was happening within participants' accounts. In everyday terms, this relates to a person's sense that their life has stability, continuity and enough predictability for them to feel secure in who they are and where they belong. His research suggests that policing can contribute strongly to this sense of security because officers may derive financial stability, purpose, identity and social connection from their career.
The difficulty comes when some of those same things begin to feel uncertain.
An officer who once felt secure within their team might become isolated during an internal investigation. Someone who previously enjoyed making decisions might begin worrying about how every decision could later be interpreted. An officer experiencing poor mental health might find themselves anxious about sickness procedures or returning to work, while someone approaching the end of their career may discover how difficult it is to separate their personal identity from the role they have occupied for years.
Mark's research describes participants experiencing limited resources, a perceived climate of fear and pressure associated with returning from sickness absence. His analysis also found that anxiety could continue after officers had left policing, including concerns among some participants about the future reassessment of medical pensions or Injury on Duty awards.
Professional Standards investigations provide another example of how an organisational process can become a significant stressor. Investigating allegations against officers is an essential function of policing and maintaining public confidence requires wrongdoing to be dealt with properly. Mark's research does not argue against that principle. It does, however, describe how protracted internal investigations could threaten participants' mental health and undermine their sense of security, particularly when uncertainty about the outcome continued for long periods.
This distinction has practical consequences for police wellbeing. When the primary source of distress is organisational, directing every intervention towards the individual risks addressing the symptoms while leaving the circumstances contributing to them unchanged.
Mark recognises that counselling and cognitive therapies can be helpful, but questions whether individual treatment alone can address mental ill-health when organisational relationships are contributing to its development.
That does not mean every unpopular management decision represents a welfare failure, nor should officers expect a career free from scrutiny, pressure or accountability. Police organisations have legitimate operational responsibilities and sometimes have to make decisions that individuals will find difficult.
The more useful question is whether avoidable organisational pressures are being identified with the same seriousness as operational ones.
Mark's study was principally based on the anonymised Sandford Police and cannot tell us how frequently these experiences occur across every force. What it provides is a reason to investigate them more widely.
Police forces rightly invest in helping officers cope with the difficult things they encounter while serving the public. If organisational relationships can also contribute to poor mental health, however, wellbeing cannot only be about making officers better able to cope.
It must also involve being prepared to examine whether some of the systems, cultures and processes they are being asked to cope with could be improved.