Seminar spreads suicide awareness amongst first responders

“These seminars are critically important to officers’ health and well-being,” Southern States Police Benevolent Association Director of Foundation and Media Relations Randy Byrd said. “For decades officers have been trained in officer safety to keep them alive on the street. We are now equipping them with the tools to recognize the dangers of trauma they experience in their jobs and providing coping mechanisms that could potentially prevent them from taking their own life. Simply put, one life lost to their own hand is one too many.”

Lebanon High School SRO and Southern States Police Benevolent Association Chapter President Matthew McPeak had a hand in organizing the class in Lebanon.

“I first learned about this seminar during the Southern States Police Benevolent Association state meeting last year and I immediately loved the message,” McPeak said. “When I was approached about hosting this much needed seminar I jumped at the chance and thanks to the amazing support of this community what was once only an idea has become a reality.”

This is retired police officer and licensed counselor Jeff Killion’s first time instructing the class, where he addressed the way critical incidents affect officers.

“Critical incidents are based on not even the incident itself, it’s the response to it,” Killion said. “It’s how a person interprets an event that makes things traumatic or stressful. Any event has the potential to be traumatic or stressful for a first responder.”

According to Killion, the aftereffects of critical incidents — like PTSD, depression and anxiety — oftentimes overlap.

“The common cold in law enforcement — more than PTSD — is depression,” Killion said. “First responders as a culture, we all meet some criteria under the PTSD realm because it’s so closely related to so many other things.”

According to bluehelp.org, 163 first responders took their own lives in 2023. Of those deaths, 118 were in law enforcement, 25 were firefighters, six were in emergency management services, four were dispatchers and 10 were corrections officers.

“Mental health has this negative stigma attached to it and that’s even more true in the law enforcement community,” McPeak said. “I think there is always this fear that acknowledging these issues will somehow make us appear unfit for duty or damaged. This could not be further from the truth, and seminars like this will show law enforcement personnel what resources they have and how to access these resources in their own time.”

McPeak said the information shared during the seminar would have different meanings for those in attendance.

“Every officer you know or see in the public has seen the same critical incidents and they have had similar effects on all of us,” McPeak said. “No one answers this calling without receiving their own scars, and more training of this type in the future will get lifesaving knowledge into the average officer’s hands so that they can understand why they feel a certain way or respond to things a certain way. This seminar is also open to spouses of law enforcement, and it will give them the tools they need to best support their spouse.”