force, substance use and addictions, discord in family relationships, and suicide). According to Szyf, Tang, Hill, and Musci (2016), this process is preventable and reversible if such manifestations are properly identified through the assessment of first responders during their hiring and training. Additional research and historical analysis of past law enforcement officers’ suicides can help in this process.
Strides in research about first responder mental health
A new way of addressing first responder mental health that has had significant success in recent years is brain balancing. This new procedure, performed by Vitanya Brain Performance, involves clients attending 10-15-minute neurofeedback and 10-minute biofeedback sessions twice a week for 12 weeks, then once a week for 12 weeks. The first step in the process is mapping the brain to find areas that are over- or under-communicating. Next, researchers work to find the frequencies needed to make changes and improve the communication between the brain and the body. This stage takes approximately one month, after which the clients can work with a biofeedback headset that uses light and sound to make changes. This headset uses bilateral stimulation, which is the same mechanism that REM sleep uses to flush out trauma. Usually, during REM sleep, information from the day before is filed into long-term and short-term memory. But when trauma occurs, instead of this process, the information is filed away and is sorted differently into the brain. Therefore, those experiencing PTSD or living with trauma can be triggered by similar experiences, because the brain has not processed the information correctly. Brain balancing can allow people to refile the information properly, enabling them to separate themselves from the experience, so that the brain can file it the way it originally would have (S. Smith, personal communication, 2022). The headset also uses binaural beats, in which the ears receive two different frequencies, as a result of which the brain creates a third frequency that helps build new connections during every session. This can
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