The Psychological and Physical Impact of Trauma of First Responders

The Psychological and Physical Impact of Trauma of First Responders
Student:
Professor:
Institution:
Course title:
Date:
Abstract.
The U.S. has become aware of veterans that return home with post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) and are in dire need of psychological and physical help and training. The public is mindful of the disruptions brought by events and critical incidents that the veterans face and are therefore very supportive and very resourceful in their recovery. However, the public is unaware of the other group of people that exist and serve their community locally and succumb to PTSD and psychological and physical trauma. These are the first responders, who run towards the critical incident whereas everyone else is running in the opposite direction. According to Flannery (2015),the first responders to critical incidents have a 5.9-22% chance of developing PTSD and psychological trauma whose impacts are behavioural, mental and physical. This is a wide population that is at risk, given the rates of critical incidents happening in the community every day. There is need for first responders to get treatment, yet research focus has been very limited in their favour
Garner et al alludes that trauma does not only affect the traditional survivors but also the first responders who go through occupational illnesses and injuries and they then develop depression and mental and traumatic disorders (Garner et al, 2016). This paper will look at a case study of a firefighter that would then reveal the connection between the first responders and trauma affiliations and later on discuss the interventions to be taken and an appreciation of the healing of trauma victims.
Introduction
First responders
First responders are an inclusive group of both military and medical personnel plus volunteers of disaster rescue, police officers and firefighters. These people experience high levels of trauma individually and as a group. The first responders of critical incidents from Hurricane Katrina, 9/11 and Wen Chuan earthquakes, have been studied in order to come up with treatments for the first responder’s specific mental health conditions. First responders are inclined to PTSD, depression, and acute stress disorders with reference to particular variables like trauma preparation, age, self-efficacy, previous experiences, social support, and substance abuse (Garner et al, 2016).
The first responders have their mental needs unknown to the public. They are a focused group of people, and differential women and men that do not complain, as it is part of their job. Their idea of seeking counselling for their mental health problems that arise from the critical incident they respond to is not thought about. They are very busy people and they need to respond to call after call and ensure that they can save lives of the people in their community, hence, they hardly get time for counselling. Unfortunately, since they do not get treatments from the clinical and specified teams that could help them manage their trauma, they tend to medicate themselves after a traumatic incident.Therefore, they do not reach out for help. The perception of first responders on the media is not focused on the work they do but rather the victims they saved from the traumatic incident. The victims are perceived as the ones with trauma not the first responders. Therefore, the treatment centres and research on intervention strategies for first responders are minimal as compared to cases of rape or the veterans.
There are factors that may influence the first responders from developing psychological and physical trauma like having little control on the number of calls received and also first responders have to continue receiving calls even after receiving disturbing calls that may have mentally affected them. Other scenarios would include the first responders experiencing their own child’s death while in the line of duty, or the first responders losing their partners from suicides or shootings or fires incidents, or when the first responders work without administration support or they are being questioned by the administration about certain incidents that they investigated or worked upon. The amount of stress experienced by first responders is very cumulative and there is need for pressure release or instances where first responders get a chance to talk about their work pressures and find ways of dealing with their psychological and physical trauma either individually or as a group before they are damaged permanently.
Psychological and physical trauma
Psychological trauma has been a misunderstood entity in the history of America. It was previously noted in wars and referred to as Soldier`s Heart during the civil war and Shell Shock during the world wars. The National Vietnam Readjustment survey conducted on returning solders, created a platform for an intensive study on the nature, incidences of PTSD and psychological and physical trauma. The resultant was a wide network of studies on not only the nature but also the treatment interventions like cognitive behavior therapy and eye movement decentralization. The interventions were only beneficial to some of the first responders and so more research needed be done to tackle the trauma affected by the other first responders that were not responding to the treatments (Flannery, 2015).
Psychological trauma is identified in the first responders’ physical and psychological response to witnessing, experiencing and confronting critical incidents which would involve deaths and injuries, therefore, creating intense fear and a sense of helplessness.Psychological trauma disrupt three domains of the first responders, these are:
1 Reasonable environmental mastery.
2 Care and attachment to other people
3 Meaningful purpose in life
Psychological trauma symptoms are divided into three:
Physical symptoms: these are caused by psychological stimulation of an individual, and include hypervigilance and embroidered frighten response.
Intrusive symptoms: these consists of memories of the critical incident that happened.
Avoidance symptoms: these are instances where the victims avoid visiting the critical incident site and the victims cannot discuss the incident. Additionally, the victims have reduced their interest in basic life activities (Flannery, 2015).
These symptoms need to be responded to or else PTDS will result after 30 days and can last even up to death (Flannery, 2015).
The case study
The case study conducted by Garner et al, was of a fire fighter called Paul. Paul was a 52 year old male, the youngest of four children. He agreed to be a case after he realized he was a survivor of trauma. Paul revealed that he had been a firefighter since the age of 16 and he had never seen himself as a survivor for all the years he has worked as a first responder to a critical incident. The incidents he has been involved with included house fires, accidents and disasters and he dealt with them on a daily basis. He read a literature on survivors and trauma and later on he identified himself as a survivor of the critical incidents which is his normal occupation. Paul revealed to the researchers that he did want to save everyone but he regretfully said how much he could not tell the number of individuals that had died while he was on duty. He remembered that when he was 16, he had his first fire fatal incident, where the mother and her two daughter died in the fire. But since then, he is not aware of the number of people that had died while he was on duty. He described that there were so many people that had died between the house fires and accidents that he had attended to. He explains that by the time they get to the scene of the critical incident, only 5% of the people were usually alive. In general, most of them die by the time they get there. Paul goes ahead to describe that he had always been on high alert, very nervous, stressed, and freaked out. He also had difficulty in sleeping at night and had a high level of stress. By the time he reached thirty, he had begun receiving stress tests (Garner et al, 2016).
Paul described his personal life as not so good, since he did not like himself. He had previously been involved in an accident that had left his face with many scars by the age of two. However, he has a child but he is separated from the mother of the child. Their separation was due to the fact that her wif...