It’s OK not to be OK An open letter to officers struggling with PTSD
In May 2021, Sergeant Graeme Porteous walked out the front door of his house with the intention of taking his own life. Exhausted from years of battling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Sgt Porteous felt he’d nothing left. Nine hours later, emergency services, including the WA Police Force, found Sgt Porteous in a drunken stupor, luckily before he’d achieved his objective. One year on from the darkest day in Sgt Porteous’s life, he’s penned an open letter to Police News, which he hopes will convince his troubled brothers and sisters in blue to get the help he was so reluctant to seek. Our members are taught to run towards danger, not away from it and the high-pressure environments in which our members work is a major contributory factor to the data we cited in December’s Police News. Over the past 20 years, the rate of suicide among serving Australian police officers has more than doubled. In the second half of the past decade, the rate of suicide among serving Australian police officers increased significantly more than among their American, British and French counterparts. At the turn of the century, serving Australian police officers were three times more likely to die in the line of duty than by their own hand. Today, the opposite is true. Read Sgt Porteous’s open letter and call out for help if you need it.
14 POLICE NEWS MARCH 2022
Hello everyone. My name is Graeme Porteous, and I’m in my 40th year of policing, which includes 31 years on the WA Police Force’s frontline. The job has changed significantly since I joined in 1982. It was far more regimented back then than it is today. We were told, very early in our careers, to keep what happens at work, at work. We were to tell no one, not even our wives or families. It’s advice I followed religiously for decades. Back in the old days, alcohol was the preferred method of dealing with stress. I saw many colleagues develop an unhealthy overreliance on alcohol. Marriages were ruined. Work hard, play hard was the catchcry. I wasn’t a big drinker in the 1980s, but that changed over time. Like you, I’ve enjoyed many postings, both country and metropolitan, in various roles. Like you, I’ve witnessed many unpleasant, confronting and disturbing incidents. More than some. Fewer than others. The deaths of three colleagues as a result of PTSD and two colleagues who lost their lives while on duty haunt me. I always considered myself to be a resilient person. I was enthusiastic and gregarious in nature. I had a positive outlook on work and life in general. I had a great job, a great wife and three great kids. What else is there? That all changed sometime around 2000 when I started experiencing odd flashbacks of things long past. Unhelpful memories were being propelled to the forefront of my mind. It would happen at any time of the day or night. Images randomly popped into my head. I couldn’t make sense of it. I began experiencing night terrors, which woke me regularly, disturbed my sleeping patterns and eventually impacted my general health and well-being. Like many others, I turned to alcohol to help manage my symptoms and deteriorating mental health. Doctor-prescribed medicines followed. In the early 2000s, lots of people, both inside and outside the WA Police Force, started talking about PTSD. I considered it as a legitimate ailment for defence personnel, but not so much for police officers. Generally speaking, I wasn’t sure I believed in it for coppers. From my experience, officers suffering from stress-related illnesses were widely viewed with scepticism and adversely judged by colleagues and supervisors, including me.
