Mental health a top priority for first responders in La Plata County – The Durango Herald

Sheriff’s captain speaks from firsthand experience in warning police academy graduates about PTSD

During his four decades in law enforcement Capt. Ed Aber of the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office has seen more death and trauma than most people will see in a lifetime.

He lost count of the number of autopsies he attended and the number of fingerprints lifted from dead bodies – not to mention the murders, suicides and incestuous rapes investigated – all in his first nine years in law enforcement as an agent with the U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division.

Witnessing trauma again and again can have a debilitating and insidious culminating effect on first responders in particular, which if not properly addressed can lead to PTSD, and far too often a descent into alcohol and drug addiction, divorce and suicide.

The awareness of post-traumatic stress disorder by agencies responsible for the welfare of first responders, along with the need for treatment has come a long way since Aber’s early days on the job, which was reflected in his being chosen to address PTSD as the keynote speaker at the Pueblo Police Academy’s 2022 spring graduation.

“To give kind of a blunt picture, in the ’80s when I started my career, if there was an officer-involved shooting it was pretty much – pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get your ass back to work,” he said. “That was kind of the mindset and the mentality. It was looked on as a sign of weakness or perceived as a sign of weakness if you needed mental health help.”

Aber is the coordinator for the Interface Critical Incident Debriefing Team, which was started by other first responders in Durango in the 1980s, but did not find its stride until 10 years ago.

“Law enforcement has always been behind the power curve in looking out for the well-being of their officers and emphasizing mental health and wellness,” Aber said. “But we reestablished a team, built a significant membership and went out and did education, mainly to administrators.”

The perception that needing help with mental health is a weakness has certainly changed and needs to continue to change until “we start seeing fewer and fewer suicides,” he said.

“In my 41-plus years in the profession, I’ve been to more officers’ funerals who died by their own hand than I have that have been killed in the line of duty,” Aber said. “I think a lot of it is just that accumulation of carrying these traumas.”

According to the Officer Down Memorial Page there were 210 officers killed in the line of duty this year, 652 in 2021 and 1,823 in the last five years.

“Depending on what study you look at, there’s somewhere between 300 and 600 officers that die by suicide every year,” Aber said. “And those numbers are really challenging to pinpoint. The only thing I can base it on is my own personal experience.”

Being exposed every day

While those who are not first responders may experience one or a few traumatic events that will stick with them for the rest of their lives, it is something first responders deal with sometimes on a daily basis, Aber said.

“That accumulation gets to the point where it can be debilitating,” he said. “I have a theory that when you first get sworn in and take that oath to protect the Constitution and protect and defend the citizens, it takes precedence over the officer’s well-being. So when there is an active shooter situation the cops are running toward the gunfire putting themselves in harm’s way to protect somebody they may have never seen before. It kind of creates this mindset that your value is less than somebody else’s to some degree.”

Asked to describe the symptoms of PTSD, Aber said the simplest thing would be to define depression, “which is huge.” In the critical incident reports given to first responders there is a list of symptoms.

“If someone has one or two they can probably cope with it, but if they have more than two they need to reach out for help,” her said. “And we break them down into physical, mental and emotional.”

Physical signs may include: chest pains, fatigue, chills, difficulty breathing, accelerated blood pressure, rapid heart rate, shock symptoms, thirst, vomiting, fainting, dizziness, muscle tremors, grinding teeth, visual difficulties and profuse sweating.

Mental signs are: confusion, nightmares, uncertainty, hyper vigilance, suspiciousness, blaming others, impaired thinking, poor abstract thinking, poor concentration, poor decisions and flashbacks.

Emotional responses can be: nightmares, night terrors, fear, guilt, grief, panic, denial and anxiety.

“An officer starts this career with the concept of, ‘I’m going to save the world, I’m going to make it a better place,’” Aber said. “And when you respond repeatedly to the same types of calls and see the same tragedies over and over it affects your sense of self-worth. You wonder, ‘What am I doing? I’m not making a difference.’

“So you have to redefine what you want to accomplish, what you can accomplish,” he said. “It actually goes from, ‘Hey, I’m going to save the world,’ to ‘If I can make a difference in somebody’s life – it’s worth it.’”

Making a difference

An incident occurred while Aber was overseas with the Criminal Investigation Division that sticks with him to this day. There were a lot of child sexual assaults perpetrated by service members on their children and stepchildren, he said.

“I worked a particular case with a 13-year-old girl that had been impregnated by her stepdad, who was in the military, four different times,” Aber said. “And on those four occasions he took her to Amsterdam for abortions.”

The mother was in complete denial and the girl kept quiet until one day she told a junior high friend, who in turn told her parents who contacted law enforcement. The stepfather went to Leavenworth military prison and the mother and daughter returned to the States.

“And about six months later I got a card from the girl and it said ‘thank you for helping me face and deal with something I knew I was going to have to deal with it at some point in my life. I really appreciate you.’ I still have that card from 30 years ago. Because that’s where you can make a difference, one person’s life.”

Despite having night terrors and nightmares, some so violent his wife had to awaken him because he was elbowing her in the head while dreaming he was being attacked, Aber did not realize he suffered with PTSD until an incident about 12 years ago.

He doesn’t remember the specifics of what pushed him over the edge, he just remembers it was at the scene of someone’s death that the accumulation of everything finally caught up to him.

“I wasn’t knowledgeable about this stuff and I kind of felt like I was losing my mind and I was going to have to quit doing what I love doing,” he said.

Later, he was on the couch when his wife left for work. She said something to him but he’s not sure if he mumbled something or did not respond at all. She barged back into the house.

“’Do you want a divorce?’ she said. And I’m like, ‘Where did that come from?’ And she stormed out of the house. When she got home we talked about it and she said, ‘You haven’t even talked to me in two weeks,’” Aber said.

But it was “buckle up and go back to work,” he said. And that’s when Aber responded to a car crash and talked with two firefighters he knew who were standing on the road, above where a car had rolled off into a ravine killing the driver. Other responders were down next to the vehicle and Aber asked the two if they had gone down? They said no.

“And I was struggling to get the courage to ask them, and finally I said, ‘Can I ask why?’ And they said, ‘You know, we see so much that if we don’t have to put ourselves in that situation we don’t, so that when we do have to, we still do it.’

“And that one little conversation on the side of the road helped me to realize, ‘Hey, you’re not losing it. This is real.’ And it sent me on this quest for looking into and better understanding PTSD. And for the first time I was able to go home and go to sleep. It was just a relief because I honestly felt like I was going crazy.”

A filing system

In an emotional part of the critical-incident debriefing, first responders learn how to put incidents into a metaphorical filing cabinet in their mind and close the door, Aber said. It is not erasing or burying the incident, but it helps to normalize the experience. And they can always open the file drawer when they want.

“In the debriefing we talk about the experience, we talk about the impacts emotionally and what they are experiencing” Aber said. “To hear someone else say I haven’t been sleeping helps to normalize that, that it is a normal reaction in an abnormal situation. And hearing that helps you say OK, I’m not losing my mind. I’m in this shared thing, this shared event. So it helps you to be mentally prepared to go into the next situation and deal with it and not ignore, avoid and internalize it.”

Allison Brown Cole is the victim resources and wellness coordinator with the La Plata County Sheriff’s Office.

She said Aber’s willingness to share real experience is vital for anyone struggling with any type of PTSD. She said when that filing cabinet gets too full, too many files, it is important to have some intervention or to vent with friends, co-workers or even a pastor.

“One size doesn’t fit all,” Cole said. “So having a robust complement of resources is critically important.”

Some other therapeutic techniques include hobbies, doing things with friends and exercising. All of which help to shift a person’s focus. The biochemical release of endorphins from exercise is huge, Cole said.

“When a person is engaged in an intense, either physical activity or they’re concentrating on a target, in that moment the brain is not focused on what it was focused on, so that physical activity is important because it helps shift our focus,” Cole said.

Another great tool in a situation where someone is feeling depleted, angry, frustrated or sad and needs to recharge is biofeedback, which in laymen’s terms is regulating the breathing, smoothing out the breathing which in turn helps to smooth out the heart rate.

“The resilience of that process incorporates our physiology, our mental outlook,” Cole said. “We can shift what we are currently focused on.

“I had one officer say that when he finally did that he had an incredible exhilarating feeling. So that coherence of resilience includes the physiology, the emotional well-being of the person. And for some people, incorporating the totality of the spiritual experience with that enables, really facilitates, an overall sense of better well-being.”

gjaros@durangoherald.com