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Jackson Police went through special training this past week for two reasons – to help victims of trauma be able to process what they’ve been through better and to help themselves do the same.
Major Phillip Kemper of JPD was on hand for the training and discussed why the training is necessary for emergency responders.
“We’ve seen research that indicates that traumatic events that a typical person goes through maybe two or three times in their lifetime, a law enforcement officer will deal with an average of seven per year,” Kemper said. “When you do the math, over a 25- or 30-year career, that number can get well into the hundreds before the officer retires.”
Kemper cited that depression, suicide and divorce rates are higher among law enforcement officers because of all the trauma they endure as part of the job.
“We traditionally haven’t processed those traumatic events well ourselves,” Kemper said. “We do our best to help those who’ve gone through them – the victims – deal with it, but not ourselves.
“But hopefully training like this and similar training will help us to do a better job at both.”
Dr. Jenna Britt and her team at ReEnvision Counseling conducted the training that focused on critical incident desensitization and acute traumatic incident protocols. These methods have been in use for about 15 years and have proven successful for those who’ve gone through events like violent crime or natural disasters.
Britt stressed they are not therapy but better classified as “psychological first aid” to aid in decreasing the disturbance and vividness of a traumatic experience.
Officers were trained in dealing with the trauma they experience in the short-term but also helping each other and victims out when they’ve experienced a traumatic incident.
“We consider it a tremendous honor to get o work with these first responders and support them in the work they do,” Britt said. “All these types of providers encounter trauma and chronic stress in their lines of work, and we want them to not have to sacrifice their own quality of life or their relationships with their families in order to keep doing that they do to care for others.”
Kemper said there are plans for JPD to go through more similar training, and plans are in the works for Jackson Fire Department to have fire fighters go through the training as well.
“I hope it’s a big help for us because we can encounter so much with a shooting happening and then we’re called to a car accident that may involve a death and then handling a drug overdose,” Kemper said. “That’s a lot to take in separately, and law enforcement officers do that multiple times a week.
“We need to be able to deal with that properly to keep ourselves mentally healthy, which is just as important as being physically healthy.”
Reach Brandon Shields at bjshields@jacksonsun.com or at 731-425-9751. Follow him on Twitter @JSEditorBrandon or on Instagram at editorbrandon.
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