PTSD in the Police Service - it exists and is deadly

PTSD blights lives, it is not just a condition exclusive to the Armed Forces,

Writes Frank Whistler, who provided this piece...

'The job is what you make it...'

When I joined the Police service in the late 1980's an old Chief Inspector told me that on the first day in the job.

I had no idea what the future was going to be on that initial day, for me it was a change of career and just a means of putting something back into society and leaving it a better place at the end of things.

My service was cut short due to an injury received on duty, by the time I was retired on ill health grounds after about seven years of service, I had had about enough of the job to be honest. But it wasn't something that was just going to rest. The job came back to haunt me most days of most weeks for the next 20 years.

The career

Many people I knew in the job seemed to be able to navigate it without any real apparent stress or be subject to any really testing situations. Perhaps it was just some sort of destiny that although my time in that 'world' was relatively short, it was packed with what some might call 'adventure'. I certainly seemed to see more challenging situations than some of my colleagues.

Situations

The problem with an arena like this is that one moment you can be on foot around a town minding your own business and the next thing, an armed robbery at a bank has just gone off and you're picked up by a Patrol Car and off around the area looking for the offender.

That actually happened to me. On our drive around, I spotted a person on a railway station platform that matched the offender's description from the bank job and my colleague and I went to investigate - unarmed. 

This is no bullshitting or heroics, we went on to the platform and came around behind the person of interest and fortunately, it turned out that our 'suspect' was just an innocent football supporter on his way to a match. 

But that could easily have been a very nasty situation. (You just get in there and have to act. You don't really think about what could go wrong, that's the difference between ordinary citizens and those in the Police service. When most people go to work, their exposure to danger is often a lot less than ours.)

The incident all ended pleasantly and we just went back to what we were doing. They never did get the offender for it. But when you get too many of those occurrences building up, you need a safety valve to deal with it.

The hanged woman

I recall in our force that a policewoman was found hanged. The verdict was suicide. I didn't know her as she was from the other side of the county, but it made me wonder what drove her to this desperate action?

There had to be something that started that process. Why didn't she seek help? That was just the start of the obvious questions in my mind. At each stage of the events that led to her death, why did she not stop or get help? The answer is I don't know. I hope she has found peace.

Sadly, a young man I was at school with hanged himself aged around 27, a terrible waste. Colleagues of mine attended that one. Drugs was a major factor causing psychosis in his case, he got caught with drugs and charged and maybe that tipped him over the edge to take his own life, when his ideal of starting a new life abroad was torn to shreds by
that conviction.

Walking towards possible death

I happened to be walking back to the station one lunch time when a WPC I was with was approached by a member of Joe Public and reported a car with no number plates parked opposite a mainline railway station we were near to. 

In reality, it was off our ground and out of our jurisdiction, but we went to take a look anyway. The WPC was newly engaged, I decided that risking both our lives was stupid and she had more to risk losing than me.

So I gave her my radio and said 'There's no point in us both getting killed' and walked towards the car to investigate. Perhaps a stupid thing to do, someone could have been watching from across the tracks ready to set something off when I got near to it.

To cut a long story short, I'm still here. But for a few nasty moments there was always the possibility that it could have been a car bomb. The walk there to that car I can still recall, it was a lonely place to be. When you think about it afterwards, it really does shock you to consider that your life could have ended then.

There is a fine line between courage and stupidity. I just hope I was on the right side of it then. I thought about the situation afterwards and it did make me take a few deep breaths, then I just got on with things. 

That was just a situation that you had to act on, weighed against the possible distraction of shutting a 4 track mainline rail route which might have turned out to be a false alarm. I got away with it, it could have gone horribly wrong though.

Actions and consequences

The job can take a toll of people's relationships, even people in the job who marry people within, it doesn't always last and I've seen plenty of that happening. The WPC in the last snippet married, it didn't last long. Sadly.

What if I had been killed at that abandoned car? I guess its just the way it goes. Just another person who had died in harness. Or got lucky because I didn't. When I consider my late school friend's lost potential, what he could have done, it made me value things more. 

Because we often have to deal with things in the job that the average member of society doesn't, unless you can manage it, it can build up. These days there is counselling at the drop of a hat, 25 years ago, you just mostly got on with it and dealt with it as best you could.

Some did succumb to stress or alcohol, or gambling for example, but these last items are displacement mechanisms to push away the real cause of the problems. Realising and acting to do something about a recognised problem is a start.

Recognising the problem is the key. Not being able to see the wood for the trees is a big problem, some people can't see they have a problem. That's a dangerous situation starting to form.

Combat stress

The world has become more violent without a doubt since my time in the job, the root cause of most crime back then 25 years ago was to feed drugs habits and not much seems to have changed. DVD players, camcorders, alloy wheels, car stereo systems were the hot crime trends. Just to feed the habit, enough to buy a fix.

It was often the same old faces, doing the same old crimes, same old usually small price for the fenced goods to pay for a drug hit. 

I heard about combat stress and PTSD in respect of a program I saw about the Vietnam war and realised that some of what the American soldiers reported experiencing were things I could understand. 

To me, leaving the job when I was retired on ill health was sudden and final. Although I did continue to work occasionally with some colleagues on unfinished business, I ceased that after about three years, making a break and moving to a different country to make a new life. 

It was about then you'd start more to experience more night dreams where you'd be in a Police situation but you'd either be with no one you knew but they knew you or you'd be somewhere you knew. It was very inconsistent. But in those dreams you always felt a bit of an outsider and that the reason for being in this 'experience' was unfinished business. 

I'd had those dreams within the time in the job, but I suppose they were some sort of occupational hazard and probably discounted as being unusual because of the environment I was in.

But how to deal with it? Otherwise I had a pretty normal 9-5 type existence of sorts.

At the end of the day

Well, what now? How do I fix this? Will it get me? - The really big question was why was I continuing to have these dreams? It was a line in that film - 'Eight years later, they're still fighting the Vietnam war.' A way was needed of putting the old life 'to bed.' 

I worked out that the unfinished business was at the root of all this, but I realised that all I had done was enough in the job, I had had my experience in that arena and it was time to move on to do other things.

That I did professionally, but still these things plagued me. One day I embarked on a writing project which I thought about basing on my professional experience and wrote a fictional book about a fictional Police Force.

Maybe who knows, that the purpose of my service was for this end as part of some great plan? I had started writing novels after I left the job, whilst I looked for something else to do, maybe I was slowly dealing with the unfinished business through that. 

About twenty books later I started on the massive tome, it came to about 510 pages of A4 in all. There was the right mix of how life was then, how people are and a dollop of farce, because I saw plenty of that. Mindful of not giving away 'trade secrets' as such, I based my book on knowledge in the public domain and fictionalised events.

Some characters I based on people I knew or worked with, some on actors I thought could play the roles if it was filmed. The concept was to write a good book, but at the same time it did largely solve my situation. 

The unfinished business was now mostly finished, to the extent that the experiences are now just rare experiences. I was lucky, some can never shake off the unfinished business. Sometimes it winds up killing them. 

It all seems a long time ago. It was.

Mind how you go....

Just before I do, there is another compounding problem, the Police service is run along military type lines and it is easy to become institutionalised in the lower ranks - 

like those in the military also find after they leave, they have to think for them selves, self-start and just 'do things'. 

After years of following orders, this disconnect when added to the major disconnection can add to the strains of leaving 'the job' and act as an additional set of factors in 'tipping someone over.'

Supergrass 25 years on - whey they resonated for their generation

Supergrass playing Alright on Top of the Pops

Supergrass - Alright?

I first saw Supergrass playing on Top of the Pops performing their son 'Alright', which curiously featured Danny Goffey and Mick Quinn swapping instrument roles on this one.

Gaz Coombes toting the Burns Hank Marvin greenburst guitar 

Immediately as a guitarist (and Shadows music player), I spotted the front man (Gaz Coombes) with a Burns Hank Marvin greenburst guitar (designed by Shadows guitarist Hank Marvin in 1963 - check him out!), as the reverby pub piano intro to 'Alright' played, the song was catchy, it resonated and still (just) in my 20's, I thought it sounded great. I still do.

Looking back to this about a quarter of a century later, it is still one of my favourite songs. I was thinking about why good bands are successful. I came to the conclusion that it was because they resonate with their audience.

The young Supergrass - 

if you were in a band with your schoolmates you just understood this

Oxford's Supergrass came along in the Brit Pop era, along with a roll call of bands including Oasis, Blur, Pulp and any other number of post rave music performers. As with the above bands, they all resonated with their (mostly) young audiences who were growing up and finding their music.

If you were in a band with your schoolmates (as they were in those just pre-internet days), you'd likely done the apprenticeship of the pubs and clubs scene as I had done about a dozen years earlier. They'd honed their act live in front of an audience, not in the bedroom in front of the mirror. They weren't manufactured, they were doing their thing, their way. Something that has been largely lost these days with the image conscious industry.

'Alright' inspires and resonates in the same way the Beatles did with 'I wanna hold your hand'. It was upbeat, fresh, new, from a new band and just good. 'Alright' is still played on the radio today and it still sounds fresh and good, which is the sure marker that establishes it as a classic from the also rans of chart music that have largely faded into obscurity.

Supergrass - 'Moving', the CD single cover

Supergrass worked as a group well, as a four piece group, their sound was big and melodic, there isn't any real formal training to be a pop musician, you learn the instrument, get inspired, hopefully write your own songs and play. You need an ear for what sounds good, you need to write songs and find an audience for them. 

Another great track that resonates with me is their song 'Moving'. I came across it on a CD single in a local second hand shop early in the 2000's after I'd moved away from the South East, where I'd lived most of my life up until then. 

Travelling back home up the motorway from the South, I remember looking out over the fields in the fading light at a string of electricity pylons going out into the distance and the song 'Moving' came into my head, yes I had moved and it was a new life and a new place.

The later Supergrass

Again, if we take a Beatles analogy, comparing 'I'm only sleeping', a later Beatles track with its minor key sound, to 'Moving' with a lovely big opening chord which sounds like a minor chord, (but is a sustained chord) and there you have the 'introspective sound', someway away from the bright youthfulness of 'Alright'. 

In the same context, (as was 'Moving' for Supergrass,) 'I'm only sleeping' shows how the Beatles before them had matured in a short time from their initial years, to the more mature sound of what would be described as their later 'introspective' work. Indeed, as their audience matured and the world around them moved on too, so did they. I love playing around with the sound of fragmented and open chords in my songwriting. 

Is there room for more music from Supergrass as a band? I think so, Gaz Coombes remains interested in writing and performing and provided there is the will and the diary co-ordination, the group could still come together to make great music.

Inevitably though people will want to hear the early material. Early as it is, it should not be written off as immature, it is anything but, it is quality because it is still played years after it was in the charts. 

Look back at chart acts of the time from the mid 90's and study the top 40's lists of the time, how many of those records on there are played on the radio today? Not as many as you might imagine.  

The internet brings us many things but it has also brought us too much choice in some respects, many bands out there might put their own songs on YouTube, but they can be lost in the sea of songs, song how to play demo's and cover versions. 

The pubs and clubs putting on live music seems to be less than before, the money for playing in one is less than it ever was, and the opportunities to do so and get a career in music are less so - sadly it seems.