mental health

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

repair the irregularities in the communication patterns of the brain. Ponder and Smith (2021) examined the effect of therapy on veterans’ and first responders’ mental health and suicide. At the end of the 24-week period, they found an 11% increase in resilience, 13% increase in relationship satisfaction, 33% decrease in depression symptoms, 68% decrease in anxiety, 18% decrease in suicidality, and 64% decrease in symptoms of PTSD. These results remain to be replicated on a larger scale for law enforcement officers, firefighters, and EMS workers across the US in a broader peer reviewed experiment. Expanding this method to more agencies, as well as to firefighters and EMS workers, could reduce the number of first responders who die by suicide. The FBHA research has found that marital/relationship issues are the leading cause of suicides for firefighters. This is an important understanding that highlights the importance of relationship satisfaction for the mental health of first responders (FBHA, 2021; S. Smith, personal communication, 2022). Depression was the second and PTSD the fifth leading cause of suicide for firefighters (FBHA, 2021). This approach has been successful in reducing the symptoms participants are experiencing for both mental illnesses (S. Smith, personal communication, 2022). This method of reducing mental health symptoms in first responders could be successful in helping prevent suicide, as well as decreasing symptoms for all first responders.

Using the brain mapping technique on a large scale could serve as a preventive method for first responders to mitigate this crisis in our society.

Similarly, there are other types of brain mapping before intervention, including audio/visual stimulation, brain/computer interaction devices, High Performance Neurofeedback Ultra Low Power Neurofeedback and Coherence Training that are developing techniques to map and reach the brain to improve irregularities in the brain patterns. All of these techniques could make a difference in the mental health of first responders in the coming years, if government offices and law enforcement agencies invest in them and prioritize taking these new steps to protect the mental health of their first responders.