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lines to the right of the URL bar at the top of your browserIt’s important to create a culture within your agency that talks openly about mental health challenges that may arise in your profession, and provides education and services that support public safety professionals in their return to work after a post-traumatic injury.
The following are tips to creating a supportive work environment for addressing mental health:
- Create, implement, and enforce clear health and safety guidelines and policies. This can include providing education through in-services or guest speakers about symptoms of post-traumatic injury or other mental health injuries. Gaining knowledge can help one understand what they are feeling. This can help address early identification, support, and treatment for mental health symptoms associated with post-traumatic injury, burnout, or substance abuse. It is also important to establish rules prohibiting harassment towards those who have sought mental health treatment and those who may be returning to work, as well as a process for investigating complaints and consequences for violations.
- Establish programs and talk about and promote those programs frequently. Peer support teams and mental health check-ins are examples of two good program options for your department. You can learn more about these in the Mental Health Programs section.
- Provide an employee assistance program (EAP). EAPs can offer a therapeutic intervention that is employer-sponsored and designed to assist employees in coping with and resolving a variety of personal or work-related issues.
- Reduce stigma by promoting normalizing conversations about mental health. We all have mental health; mental health should not be viewed with a negative connotation. The spectrum of where each person lies in regard to current mental health status varies greatly. Being willing to discuss the concept of general mental health makes it more acceptable and easier for employees to discuss and acknowledge where they may lie on the spectrum of mental health status. Leaders who are willing to discuss their own mental health status, concerns, and experiences, can create a work environment where employees feel empowered and safe to share their own experiences.
- Include mental health training within promotional or supervisory/management training. This can help promote the idea of acceptance and also contribute to reducing the mental health stigma. This also can help provide supervisors with various tools, resources, and knowledge that can help them respond effectively when mental health concerns within employees arise.
- Create the most positive work environment that you can. A work environment that employees enjoy can help reduce work-related stress, and as a result can improve job satisfaction, work production, and performance. This can be done through recognizing and rewarding employees, investing in employees through professional training and career development, offering benefits that promote work-life balance, and welcoming employees to contribute ideas and provide feedback in decision-making processes related to their work.
- Make it easy for employees to practice healthy coping strategies in response to symptoms. This could include providing the opportunity to exercise on shift, having healthy and nutritional food items readily available, offering a meditation room or sauna, as well as implementing mental health wellness check-ins.
- Provide education on unhealthy coping strategies. Help your department understand what may unnecessarily escalate symptoms, such as excessive caffeine, nicotine, and abuse of alcohol.
- Provide an opportunity for staff to remain connected in a healthy way. This can be done through peer support programming, as well as other departmental-sponsored activities, such as a department cook-out, community service project, golf tournament, or other physical fitness event. This allows for opportunity to heal, feel support and a sense of community, where focus is not on discussing symptoms or traumas.