It’s no secret that law enforcement is a stressful profession. Compartmentalization is crucial, but one can only compartmentalize so much.
“You have to see and do some truly awful things sometimes, (and) you can’t always internalize it and put the issue to bed,” said Joe Messerich, assistant chief of the Dubuque Police Department.
Factoring in a lack of sleep and “normal life stress that everybody has,” the job can easily become overwhelming, Messerich said.
The unique challenges of law enforcement in the 21st century have also led agencies to take a closer look at the stresses of the job. Today, a community sees a police officer shoot someone and asks for body camera footage. That wasn’t the norm three decades ago.
Local departments are doubling down to ensure mental health support is a given. In Dubuque, police officers and sheriff’s deputies get annual wellness check-ins with local psychologists. Other departments have a greater challenge when it comes to resources, such as a police force of 10 in Galena, Ill.
Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice, the Dubuque Police Department began offering the wellness check-ins in 2024.
The visits are meant to help destigmatize mental health care and give officers an opportunity to reflect on their well-being, licensed psychologist Nicole Keedy said.
Keedy is one of two psychologists providing counseling services. She has been working with the department since 2018. At her local practice, Resilient Mind Psychology, Keedy specializes in treating first responders and their significant others. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa and spent two years gaining clinical experience at a Department of Veterans Affairs medical center in Milwaukee.
In 2021, Keedy began offering resilience training for new Dubuque police officers alongside licensed psychologist Thomas Ottavi. She started advising the department’s peer support team, becoming more involved with the ins and outs of local police psychology. After Keedy worked with Messerich to secure the $118,000 grant for wellness check-ins in 2024, “it really exploded from there,” she said.
Dubuque Police Chief Jeremy Jensen said the federally funded resource is unique.
“We have an incredible resource here in Dubuque with doctors Ottavi and Keedy that are doing this, and they’ve been fantastic and passionate about it,” Jensen said. “I don’t know if anywhere else has that, but without that partnership and them really wanting to do this, (it) wouldn’t have been as successful as it has been.”
The Dubuque County Sheriff’s Department, too, started wellness check-ins with Keedy in January. For sheriff’s deputies, that resource is funded through the department’s budget.
A need for diverse resources
Within both local agencies, there are several avenues for mental health support.
The Police Department has a chaplaincy program and a city-offered employee assistance program officers can turn to. There are also critical incident debriefs, which often happen after a traumatic event such as a death-related call.
Both departments conduct these sessions, which involve talking through an incident with everyone involved, including 911 dispatchers and officers.
When a Dubuque police officer experiences a traumatic event, department protocol may automatically require intervention. One example is when officers use deadly force, such as a shooting.
When that happens, “we make them aware of resources right away,” and officers have to visit with a psychologist within a certain timeframe, Messerich said.
One reason policing is unique psychologically is because officers are repeatedly exposed to high-stress incidents in rapid succession, Keedy said.
“They have a commitment to entering situations that most people would not even consider approaching, and they are expected to have skills in all of these different areas that typically would span a variety of professions,” Keedy said.
Police officers are trained to be experts in safety tactics and law enforcement, and they are also expected to support people who are struggling emotionally. They experience “nearly constant public awareness of what they’re doing and public scrutiny of what they’re doing” to a degree other professions do not, Keedy said.
Because of those challenges, Messerich said, “if you don’t have somebody that’s culturally competent in law enforcement trying to serve law enforcement officers, there’s going to be a disconnect.”
And when it comes to wellness resources, police officers need a variety of options.
“You need the outside person that’s kind of objective looking at things, but you also need that person (saying), ‘I get what you’re going through, I really do, because I’m walking in the same shoes you’re walking in,’” Jensen said.
The Police Department’s peer support team can offer that innate understanding. It’s made up of officers who are trained to be “good listeners” for colleagues who might need help, according to Dubuque Police Lt. Rick Fullmer, who supervises the team.
“They’re looking for things that might suggest there’s a need for elevated care, but for the most part, they’re there to listen, to help that person walk through it, to be a resource,” Fullmer said.
The peer support team has been in place since for close to a decade, according to Fullmer. Team members are trained by psychologists such as Keedy to provide one-on-one counseling, and they also conduct critical incident debriefs.
In the first month of the program, Jensen said the team saw about 25 visits.
“I (was) like, ‘What? I expected like, two — maybe,’” he said.
‘A veil that we don’t even know is there’
From Jensen’s point of view, growing efforts to support mental health in the Dubuque Police Department are successful.
“It’s not a stigma to do this wellness stuff anymore,” he said. “It’s not a stigma to talk about your own brain health, your own emotions (and) things like that — it really does help.”
Dubuque officers are willing to engage with resources such as annual wellness check-ins, which is significant, Jensen said. That openness he has observed wasn’t always present.
It doesn’t happen often that an officer decides to leave the profession because of mental health challenges, Jensen said, “but it has happened.”
“There’s been several times over the years where things weren’t in place like they are now,” he said.
Fullmer said it’s “certainly not uncommon” for an officer to leave policing entirely because of the strains of the job.
“That’s been the case for a few people that I know of,” he said. “People that have left and retired say, ‘Oh gosh, I (didn’t) realize how stressed out I was. I’m sleeping so much better now,’ and that sort of thing. The stress that we carry, I’ve heard sometimes described as a veil that we don’t even know is there — and until it’s gone, you don’t realize that you have it, that you carry that much stress with you every day.”
Historically, police officers have not tended to seek help for mental health struggles, Keedy said.
“They might have been worried about confidentiality or consequences within their department if they sought mental health care, they may not have felt that they would be understood with regard to the work that they do, and then there was just a general stigma broadly for mental health services,” she said. “I would say those concerns continue to some degree, but they’re lessening.”
In Keedy’s view, the stigma is changing in Dubuque.
“I think that culture here locally has demonstrated a pretty clear shift over the last decade in increasing openness and discussion of mental health care and resilience efforts within their departments, among leadership and officers in general,” she said.
The increased attention to mental health comes as the profession receives more scrutiny on local and national levels.
Over the past 30 years, the threat level of policing has grown “tenfold,” said Timothy Whitcomb, former sheriff of Cattaraugus County, New York. When Whitcomb graduated from the police academy 37 years ago, he didn’t have an assault rifle in his car or a body camera on his uniform.
“You think about how our society has changed and the responsibilities (have) changed in the short three decades that I worked, and it gets your attention,” he said.
Whitcomb presents to police departments across the country about post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide rates in law enforcement. The initiative is personal for Whitcomb, who became sheriff of Cattaraugus County after the former sheriff, his close friend, died by suicide.
“It became abundantly clear to me that post-traumatic stress disorder was responsible for suffocating a lot of the quality of life out of a lot of my brothers and sisters at work,” Whitcomb said.
In October, Messerich brought Whitcomb to Dubuque to present to local law enforcement — an opportunity also funded by the Police Department’s federal grant.
“The mere fact that the city of Dubuque brought my half-day training in and made certain that every employee got to see it — you guys are well ahead of the curve,” Whitcomb said.
Different barriers for smaller agencies
Across the river in Galena, Ill., Police Chief Eric Hefel said smaller law enforcement agencies often encounter unique mental health strains.
There is increased pressure to maintain community safety in a department with only 10 full-time police officers, Hefel said. And when an officer — or several — are out of commission for any reason, Galena loses a chunk of its police force.
“You worry about burnout,” Hefel said.
Where statistics show higher rates of PTSD and death by suicide among law enforcement officers, those numbers “aren’t quite as high” for very small police departments, Keedy said.
“There seems to be maybe an inherent degree of support within a small department that is different than a larger department,” Keedy said. “That said, they can still encounter major events and traumas and cumulative trauma, and so the support is important.”
There is also the assumption that a small police force such as Galena doesn’t deal with the same level of crime Dubuque officers do, thus making the job easier — “but it happens here,” Hefel said.
In his career at the Galena Police Department, Hefel has worked four homicide cases — three of them involving children.
“When you have a bigger department, I think it’s easier to get the help you need, I think because you have a larger base of officers that are experiencing this,” he said. “But to me, if you have one that does and needs help, I think it’d be worth it — it’s just a little more difficult.”
Hefel began working as a police officer in 1997 and started at the Galena department in 2011, becoming chief in 2021. He said he has observed a “drastic change” in attitudes about mental health in the profession.
“When I started in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, it was kind of a mentality of, (if) you had a critical incident or something that could possibly affect you, just kind of suck it up and move on to the next call, whatever,” Hefel said. “Now, there’s a lot more resources available.”
In Galena, Hefel said the department makes a point to prioritize mental health.
When a traumatic event happens, department leadership talks to officers involved and often runs critical incident debriefs. Hefel will also refer officers to resources such as Concerns of Police Survivors and CopLine, which offer mental health programming and direct support.
Still, from Hefel’s perspective, “a lingering stigma” remains.
The department is limited when it comes to mental health resources funded by federal dollars, unlike the Dubuque Police Department.
Because Illinois is a sanctuary state, the federal government is no longer awarding grants to local law enforcement agencies, Hefel said. President Donald Trump has said he will deny federal funding to states with local governments that do not comply with his administration’s immigration policies.
“We have a hard time getting them in Illinois now. … With our governor, they’re going against federal regulations,” Hefel said. “I guess, you know, it’s a battle between the politicians, so there’s a lot of federal grants and stuff that we’re not available for.”
No ‘checklist’ to measure trauma impact
For Dubuque County Sheriff’s Department Deputy Rob Freund, mental health no longer feels “taboo” like it did when he started as a correctional officer in 2008.
“I think over the past couple years, people have realized that mental health needs to be taken a little more seriously,” Freund said. “Over the years, we’ve had traumatic events that have happened and we’ve done critical incident debriefs — that’s kind of where it started.”
The debriefs have been helpful for Freund, who has worked for the sheriff’s office for 17 years. It’s difficult to go home and talk about work, he said.
“It’s hard to talk to somebody who hasn’t actually had to be in that situation and deal with all of the trauma that comes with it,” Freund said.
Dubuque County Sheriff Joe Kennedy said he personally has found critical incident debriefs beneficial. He has responded to many death scenes throughout his career. It’s a hard thing to process.
“The old days of just telling people to suck it up — obviously, those are over,” Kennedy said. “As a community and as a county, I think we need to do the best job we can to protect the people that are protecting our citizens.”
Kennedy has never been a party in an officer-involved shooting, but he’s experienced a few incidents over the years that stuck with him.
As a military veteran, Kennedy said, “I’ve seen people die in probably just about every way you can imagine possible.”
“A lot of times, people may be standing around a death scene and they may hear someone make (an) inappropriate comment or something like that, and it’s not to be disrespectful to the deceased person,” Kennedy added. “They’re basically trying to help themselves to get through the situation (by) deflecting away from what they’re seeing.”
Like police officers, sheriff’s deputies are exposed to potentially traumatic calls at any given moment. Everybody handles situations differently, and there’s no “checklist” to measure how a certain incident might affect someone, Freund said.
“I try and keep work at work and (home) stuff at home,” he said. “But I’ve had days where — not on purpose, my kids don’t know anything — but the one call I can think of, we had spaghetti, and (my daughter) goes, ‘Oh, it looks like blood,’ and it was a sauce that she was talking about, and I was done.”
The more law enforcement talks about mental health challenges, the more natural it becomes, Freund said. In his view, burnout is common and there is high turnover in the profession today.
“People don’t ever want to ask for help,” Freund said. “They don’t want to be a burden on people, but I think they need to know that it’s OK to go and talk to people and seek help if they need it.”
That adage of “it’s OK to not be OK” is something local law enforcement takes to heart, Kennedy said.
“Nobody wants to know that somebody that they’re working with is struggling and nothing is being done about it because the person (may) feel that there’s a stigma around it,” he said. “The last thing we want to do is have to plan a funeral for a staff member because we weren’t doing enough to reach out.”