Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling or having thoughts of suicide, you are not alone — and help is always available. Call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline to connect with a trained counselor, or chat online at 988lifeline.org. Whether you’re seeking support for yourself or someone you care about, please know that it’s never too late to reach out. You deserve help. You deserve hope. Someone is ready to listen.
By Michael Hall
A note before I start: I’m a British police officer, not an American one. The uniforms and the acronyms differ on your side of the water. What I’m writing about does not.
Cumulative trauma, and the silence we build around it, crosses every border and every badge — and it comes for men and women in this job alike.
I left school at 16 and joined the Royal Navy. Nearly five years as a weapons engineer. I saw little in the way of combat — some boarding operations during a conflict — but it was the start of a life spent in hard environments among hard people, and it set the pattern for everything that came after. When I came out I spent 10 years in the prison service. All that time I’d wanted to be a police officer, and eventually I joined my local force. I served for nearly 20 years — most of it in uniform on the front line, with a stint as a detective sergeant.
I’m telling you where I came from because I want you to understand that I was not soft, I was not new and I was not unprepared. I had spent my whole working life in places most people never see. And it still took me down. That is the first thing I’d ask any supervisor to sit with: it is not the weak ones who break. It is anyone, given enough time and enough weight.
What the job actually is
I have dragged people out of burning buildings. I have fought extremely violent people on my own, with no one coming for a long time. I have been attacked with knives and other weapons. I have stood in front of a family during a protest and fought off thugs for no reason other than that the family wasn’t white. I have kicked in doors and dragged violent men off their wives while the punches were still raining down. I have taken children into protection from abuse I won’t describe here. I have performed CPR that worked and CPR that didn’t. I have cut down adults and children who had taken their own lives, and I can still feel their skin sliding down my face as I lowered them to the ground.
That is the tip of the iceberg. There is more, and it lives in my head, and it does not leave. None of those calls broke me on its own. That is the part we get wrong — we keep looking for the single one that did.
The coping mechanism we took away
I was born in the 1970s and came up through high-testosterone environments where men don’t cry and a person who gets stressed is considered weak. Understand what that culture did, because it did not only shape the men in it — it set the rules for everyone. The women who worked alongside us carried the same silence, and often a heavier version of it: pressure not just to cope, but to prove they belonged there at all. Nobody in that world got to say they were struggling.
We managed what we saw the only way we were taught to — with black humor, laughing off the unspeakable, locking the rest away. Crude, not healthy, but a release valve that got us to the next call. Over time that valve was taken away. The dark humor became something people could be disciplined for, and nothing was put in its place. If you lead people, understand the trap: you cannot remove how a team copes, however imperfect, hand them a poster, and expect the pressure to disappear. It doesn’t disappear. It goes looking for somewhere else to go.
Welfare on paper
In my experience, officer welfare was a tick-box exercise — something senior managers could point at to prove they were looking after their people, with the pretty posters and the flyers, while the policies themselves were empty. I sat in management meetings as a sergeant and heard what senior officers really thought of staff who put their hands up about their mental health. There was little sympathy in that room, and less understanding.
I’m ashamed to say I did little to fight their corner. Not because I agreed with them, but because I had learned to keep my head down. By the time my own trouble came, I stayed quiet. I’d been taught to. Remember that when you wonder why the officer in front of you isn’t saying anything.
Custody
Toward the end I moved into the custody suite. I cannot properly describe it to anyone who hasn’t sat in that chair. There are no quiet spells. A 12-hour shift is an unbroken stream of argumentative, violent, suicidal and acutely unwell people, and the legal and moral responsibility for every one of them sits with you. You cannot leave the floor, so you can never really stop. You eat when and where you can. I once spent two hours trying to eat a single apple, because every time I lifted it to my mouth someone needed a decision from me. I suspect some will laugh at that and not believe it, but it is a fact.
And into all of that a senior officer would appear — not to help, but to pull me up over a paperwork slip or the wrong protective equipment during COVID-19, and then leave again, with an even angrier, more unappreciated sergeant behind them. I was assaulted, and time and again I swallowed it, controlled my emotions and dealt with it professionally.
I didn’t notice what it was doing to me. That is the cruel part. I was driving home angry and not knowing why. Getting angrier when my wife tried to ask about it. Lying awake angry, getting up at five still angry, driving back in to do it again. Toward the end I would sit in my car in the station lot and cry before a shift, with no idea what I was crying about. Those were the signs. I couldn’t read them on myself, and nobody around me was looking for them.
The morning it ended
My last operational day began at 6 a.m. with police vans queued to book prisoners in, and an ambulance already there. It was not going to be a good day. Working through the list, it was clear most were going to be difficult. My heart sank. I did my cell checks, and in the last cell — food thrown everywhere — the occupant got up to complain about his treatment, despite having put his wife in the hospital the night before.
That is the moment I snapped. I can see it clearly even now. I felt myself losing control and knew I had to step away. I left the cell, found the custody medical practitioner and asked to talk. She sat me down and took my blood pressure. It was 220 over 109. Paramedics were called. I was sent home, and I did not come back.
The signs I couldn’t read on myself
I did not recognize my own behavioral changes until my last set of counseling, years later. I’m no expert — I can only speak to what happened to me — but I suspect a lot of officers will recognize it. Looking back over the years, I can see myself change. I went from an officer who could happily talk down violent, difficult suspects — bore them into submission, we used to say — to one who quickly went hands-on. I went from a jolly officer who liked a joke to someone with little patience or empathy for anyone, not just suspects. My family noticed I had gone quiet and insular and lost the drive to do anything. It accelerated when I moved into custody.
Toward the end my anger was extreme. I chased people off duty over stupid, slight road-rage incidents. I stood at the side of my son’s rugby pitch — I’m the team photographer — nose to nose with a groundskeeper, furious, over nothing. That is the point I want supervisors to sit with: I told myself these changes were subtle. They were not. People around me saw it. They saw I’d started to lose my temper, that I preferred to patrol alone, that I was angry, that I was sad and quiet, that I was buried in work. But instead of one person asking if I was okay, it was laughed off — “Oh, look at Mike losing it” — as if I were a bit of a freak show. The signs were all there. Nobody was reading them, because we were all trained to look away.
What a leader can actually do
So how do you catch this early in your own officers? The blunt answer is: don’t be a robot, and don’t be a slave to stats and senior managers. When you took the leadership role, you took on more than managing staff — you’re being paid that bit extra to be their advocate and their protector. I learned quickly as a sergeant that looking after your people, and being seen to be fair, is exactly what makes them want to work for you and go the extra mile. Most managers reading that will think it’s obvious. In my experience, too many still reach for the stick over the carrot and have little idea how people actually work.
The practices that help are not complicated, and that’s the frustrating part. Take the time to watch your staff. Talk to them. Talk to their colleagues. Go out on patrol with them and see how they react to incidents. Rotate people out of the relentless postings — custody, child protection, the back-to-back trauma runs — before the load sets in, not after. This should be leadership 101, but we don’t do it, because we let ourselves be drowned and distracted by bureaucracy and politics.
Approaching an officer who hasn’t asked for help is the hard part, because most of us are hiding it — I certainly was. The best way I can describe myself in those years is that I went to work with my happy clown face: laughing on the outside, crying on the inside. So don’t open with paperwork or a formal referral. Open sideways and human. “You haven’t seemed yourself lately — how are things at home?” “That was a rough one today. How are you actually doing with it?” “I’ve noticed you’re patrolling on your own a lot. Everything all right?” Then stop talking, and let the silence sit. When my welfare officer got through to me, he didn’t interrogate me. He just talked with me, generally, about life, until I trusted him enough to stop deflecting. That is the skill: patience, not a checklist.
What meaningful welfare actually looks like
Real welfare is practical, not decorative. It is not posters and flyers while resources for staff who need help remain thin. Yes, early support costs money. But count the officers in your own agency currently off sick with stress or burned out. Early intervention gets many of those people the help they need and back to work — and, more important, it sends them home to their families as functioning partners and parents. Mine nearly lost that.
And be honest about the limits: we are not mental health professionals, however much some agencies act as though we are. The job of a leader is not to be the therapist. It is to notice early, to open the conversation, and to get the officer to someone who is actually trained — a qualified welfare or mental-health professional, ideally one who understands police work and has lived through something similar.
When my referral finally came, my welfare officer wanted to see me face to face. I didn’t want to go. I saw no point, I didn’t want to talk about my feelings, and in my mind counseling was witchcraft — I’d be fine if people just left me alone. I believed that even though, by then, I had already planned my suicide and left my home to go through with it. I forced myself to go anyway, and that interaction saved my life. He was ex-forces and had been through PTSD himself.
In the first few minutes I deflected — “I’m fine,” “it’s just a wobble,” “I just need to get back to work” — and laughed it off. He wasn’t having any of it. We just talked, generally, about life, and connected over our time in the forces — there’s a strong affinity between forces personnel, and I understand it’s the same in the U.S. Once he’d relaxed me and earned my trust, he began talking about his own PTSD, his own thoughts of suicide, and every word was as if it had come straight out of my head. That was the tipping point. I burst into tears and sobbed. It all came flooding out. I talked, he listened. I didn’t feel crazy, and I didn’t feel like the loser I’d believed I was. I was made to understand this is something that happens to people. That is what a working referral looks like — and it is worlds away from a form and a phone number.
I won’t pretend it was an easy road from there. Five years on I still struggle, but I manage it — especially after I finally sat down with my wife, about a year ago, and told her everything. That was the hardest part. She’d had no idea of the state I’d been in, and she was understandably upset and angry that I’d gone through it alone — but she became my rock. That support at home is as important as anything, though it’s the part a police leader can least control. What you can control is whether the officer ever gets to that conversation at all. Notice early enough, and you keep families whole. That’s the real stake.
I do believe things are slowly getting better, and I want that to be true. But it only becomes true where someone wearing the rank decides to actually look — not at the paperwork, at the person. That’s the job now. It’s the one I wish someone had done for me a few years sooner.
About the author
Michael Hall served nearly 20 years in U.K. policing, retiring as a sergeant, after service in the Royal Navy and the prison service. His postings included front-line patrol, a detective sergeant role, and custody. He was medically retired with complex PTSD. As part of his recovery he now develops The Sworn, a police management simulator in which the mental health and welfare of officers is something leaders must actively manage.
