PTSD-attributed suicides among first responders continue to rise

The issue of post-traumatic stress disorder has been a growing concern among Canada military personnel for some time, but it is coming to the forefront for many first-responders as well, with more than a dozen suspected suicides being reported among Canadian police, paramedics and correctional service officers in the past 10 weeks alone.

One of the most recent deaths was a Manitoba RCMP corporal who watched a young man be beheaded on a Greyhound bus six years ago.

The Canadian Press reports that retired RCMP corporal Ken Barker committed suicide over the weekend after suffering PTSD and fighting depression in the years after witnessing one of Canada's most notoriously gruesome deaths.

Barker was among the first officers to respond to a standoff on a Greyhound bus in rural Manitoba in 2008, when Tim McLean was attacked, stabbed, mutilated and beheaded by Vincent Li – who was later found not criminally responsible for the death based on mental illness.

Family members told the news agency that Barker's struggle resulted with his early retirement and also his divorce. They said he killed himself in his basement over the weekend, after his condition worsened upon learning Li had been given day passes from the mental health facility.

"With Vince Li getting in the paper about his walks, he started getting flashbacks," sister Wendy Walder told the news agency.

"It was a very rapid decline in the last six months. He sent text messages like 'I think I'm too broken to ever be fixed' and he would also say 'I wish I had cancer because then people would understand.' "

According to numbers compiled an released by the Tema Conter Memorial Trust – a group committed to ending the stigma of PTSD – Barker was the 11th first responder and emergency service worker to have killed themselves over the past 10 weeks.

According to Tema Conter Memorial Trust founder Vince Savoia, there have been two more deaths since then.

"As of this morning it is 13," Savoia said grimly, during a telephone interview with Yahoo Canada News. "We've had one this morning here in Ontario and another one in Quebec."

The issue of post-traumatic stress disorder has been forced to light in Canada after a number of former soldiers came home suffering from the affliction, with several later committing suicide.

Last year, Ottawa was forced to address a spate of deaths that hit veterans of Canada's military mission in Afghanistan.

But PTSD by no means affects soldiers alone. In fact, the Canadian Mental Health Association says that eight per cent of the population will experience PTSD at some point in their lives. Doctors, nurses, paramedics and firefighters – those most likely to be exposed to horrible and graphic scenes, suffer PTSD at twice the rate of the average population.

And a study out of the University of Ottawa found that paramedics have the highest rate out of any of those high-risk jobs, higher even than police or firefighters. But comparing statistics is not the point. First-line responders are a brotherhood and sisterhood in this regard, one that is equally served by an increased awareness and an improvement in the treatment available.

"There is awareness in the emergency services ranks, it is just being ignored," Savoia said. "But I think there is a tremendous lack of awareness in society as a whole that first responders can suffer PTSD, because most of us still think it only affects members of the military."

Savoia was once a paramedic in Toronto, but quit the service in 1992, attributing his decision to a call four years earlier in which he responded to the grisly murder of Tema Conter, a young woman found bound, raped and stabbed to death.

"What made that incident so unique was that, as I stood by the bedside and pulled back the sheets to take a look at Tema, when I first looked at her I thought it was my fiancée that had been murdered," he said. "The physical resemblance was so uncanny that my partner, unprovoked, asked out loud to me, 'Is that your fiancée?'"

Savoia wasn't diagnosed with PTSD until 2000 after awareness had somewhat improved, and began committing his time to the cause. He launched the cross-country tour and founded the Tema Conter Memorial Trust.

The Heroes Are Human PTSD Awareness Tour, wrapping Friday, has attempted to make PTSD a topic of conversation among first responders, hopefully ending the stigma and internal harassment that tends to keep PTSD sufferers from speaking out.

He says improvements must be made within first response agencies, including police forces and EMS crews across the country.

"The signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress, the isolation, the anger, the flashbacks and nightmares – all those things they experience are normal," Savoia said. "What is abnormal are the events that they attend to."

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