STRESS
THE CURRENT STATE OF
MENTAL HEALTH
IMAGINE THE RESULT IF WE TRAINED FOR OUR PSYCHOLOGICAL PERFORMANCE AND SAFETY WITH THE SAME INTENSITY AS WE DO FOR OUR PHYSICAL SAFETY
IN THE FIRE SERVICE
By Brandon Evans, Founder of Fire to Light
Slowly, I lift my head from the tears that pooled in the palms of my hands. Wiping them away, I notice my 7-yearold daughter staring from the top of the stairs. She just watched her dad push her little brother to the ground after he screamed and swore in his face.
EVERYONE IS CRYING. “What the hell just happened? What did I do?” My wife looks up at me after coming to the aid of my 4-yearold son and says, “You need help.” Only a few mornings before, I responded to a fully involved house fire. As the scene unfolded, we discovered the fire had been started as a result of a homicide. It was “that call” for me. The one that drove me to the darkest point of my life. It also made
56
|
CRACKYL MAGAZ I N E
me see the light after an intensive year of healing through a variety of modalities – therapies, NLP (neurolinguistic programming), breath-work sessions, meditations, psilocybin, and finding mentorship. I began a journey that led to Fire to Light, an organization I founded that focuses on the research and development of performance-based, preventative mental health programs we call mental fitness. After navigating a mental health crisis as a firefighter, I took a hard look at the training and programs I was exposed to. I set out to research the current state of mental health in the fire service. What began as phoning the human resources department of a local fire department in Barrie, Ont., to try to
get the chief’s email eventually led to me interviewing more than 104 chiefs and leaders from five continents who represent well over 1.3 million firefighters globally. It became clear the chiefs and leaders care, that mental health concerns are real, and as the United States fire administrator said when I interviewed her, “When it comes to mental health, we are stuck in awareness.”
MORE THAN
75% OF TH E CHIE FS AN D LEADERS WE I N T E RV I E W E D
personally K N OW A FIREFIGHTER WH O HAS DI E D BY S U I C I D E .