Fire Engineering Magazine featured the Rosecrance Florian Program on their website December 20, 2014.
Those of us in the fire service encounter traumatic events in the line of duty every day. Days become years, and those years become a career that spans decades.
To deal with the stress of the job and sometimes injuries from the job, some of us turn to alcohol and other drugs to cope. Our mental health suffers, harming job performance and family life.
Ask yourself – what’s the toll on your body, your mind and your emotions after 30 years on the job?
As firefighters and EMTs, we’re very pragmatic. We see a problem and we correct it. But we’re never really taught or trained how to feel about it.
The reality is, we’re human, and we do feel. What we find out many times is that we don’t like those thoughts and feelings, so we anesthetize them.
We need to overcome the macho image of how we’re supposed to be and realize we’re human beings who are affected by years of trauma, whether we have personal trauma from losing a brother or sister in the fire service or we have secondary/vicarious trauma from the injuries and bad things we see every day.