Depression risks in police work
More than 800,000 adults and 95,000 children and adolescents in Australia
experience depression each year. Depression is a leading cause of
ongoing illness and premature death. And, as a cause of premature
death, it is expected to become as common as heart disease in the
next 20 years.
Awareness of the causes, prevention and treatment of depression needs
to increase, as does social acceptance of the diagnosis. If this understanding
occurs, those in need of treatment will likely receive it.
One can more easily spot early depression if one knows that it usually
occurs after a bereavement or stressful social events, and in social
isolation. As all these are common in today’s society, most of us
will be at risk of suffering depression.
Australia is involved in beyondblue, a major public awareness programme
to make people understand depression, and discussions were released
in a Medical Journal of Australia supplement (Oct 7, 2002).
Police work comes with a higher incidence of the types of stressful
events that increase the risk of depression. An accepting attitude
toward the possibility of depression makes it easier to cope with
its effects.
One should see depression as one sees any other illness. This will
minimize any stigma, and allow treatment to be effective.
Imagine you worked in a job in which you hurt yourself through physical
activity. You would likely accept your injury as part of the job and
have it fixed. Most people wrongly think that to get depressed at
work is to reveal themselves as stupid. But such depression is likely
a natural consequence of a work-related experience.
Working on cases in which children are injured or killed, or on those
which reveal the worst of humans’ treatment of others, can hurt you.
That hurt or depression must be treated in the same way in which a
pulled hamstring or twisted ankle would be treated.
These days, we consider the brain as we do any other part of the
body. If you get depressed, your brain does not think as it would
normally – because it is injured. We know from experiments, which
show how people think when they are depressed, that thoughts are slow
to move around. One part of the brain will think, while connections
with the rest of the brain are sluggish.
Further brain experiments show that, as the depression lifts, the
thoughts start to move around the brain again. These experiments –
using positron emission tomography (PET) scans – show the brain activity
changing when you think about different things. If you get stuck on
a depressing idea or experience, activities stick in one part of the
brain, while the rest of it remains unused and wastes slowly away.
This is exactly what happens to the muscles in the leg if you get
a knee injury: for the time you can’t use your leg, its muscles start
to waste away.
So to get your brain working after something upsets or depresses
you, you need to do exercises to get all the parts working again.
These are “thinking exercises”, which are part of counselling, psychotherapy
or other similar aids to help recovery. Just like physical activities,
some exercises are better than others, and different programmes suit
different people.
Another development has been the tablets used to treat depression.
PET scanning has shown brain activities improve with new medication,
which increases the ability of the brain to exercise all its different
parts needed to recover. This is exactly the same way that an arthritis
tablet would help your exercise programme for the recovery of a sore
knee: it would decrease the pain, make the exercise programme easier,
and eventually allow the recovery to continue with out the medication.
The social isolation associated with depression also makes it hard
to recover. Again, the nature of police work, and the expectation
to deal with your problems by yourself, put you at risk. If you deal
with cases that take a toll on your self-esteem or make you feel depressed,
you must get help. Treat depression like any physical injury: approach
the recovery in a pragmatic and optimistic way.
You do not need to handle the situation alone, and new medication
allows treatment to proceed at a better rate than it did in the past.
Treatment should never be left too long. Early intervention leaves
less likelihood of permanent injury. Even if it is some time since
you feel you were first depressed, the new understanding of this condition
has given us a chance to fix most of the problems. So no matter how
complicated or developed the depression might be, there is an answer.
Don’t take chances with an injury. Talk to someone about fixing it.
