Canada’s Lack of First Responder Suicide Stats is a National Disgrace

On the morning of April 10, 2012 Sgt. Douglas Marshall, a 22-year veteran of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) entered the Highway 12 detachment for the start of his shift and found it empty. The 45-year-old father of two drew his weapon, turned it on himself, and pulled the trigger.

Sgt. Marshall had been acting erratically since the summer of 2011. After responding to a number of traumatic calls, including a suicide and the death of a four-year-old, the veteran officer began suffering from nightmares and insomnia. Once a proud athlete and competitor, Marshall stopped running, missing the annual Terry Fox run for the first time in six years. He became impulsive, waking his son up late at night to ask about school or his hockey team. He also started suffering from flashbacks to previous trauma.

Sgt. Marshall was diagnosed with PTSD and briefly sent to a clinic for treatment in October 2011, but by mid-January, he was back on the job, and had his service weapon returned to him by February. It was that pistol he used to kill himself.

Sgt. Marshall's story is a tragedy, but it isn't a rare one in Canada. First responders across the country struggle with PTSD and suicide every day. Just how widespread this trend was remained unknown for years because no one was keeping track of the numbers. Furious at the lack of record keeping, one group is starting to shed some light on first responders' struggle with PTSD.

In 1988, Toronto paramedic Vince Savoia was called to the brutal rape and murder of Tema Conter. That call changed his life. Conter's body was covered in stab wounds, however, she looked exactly like Savoia's fiancee, so much so that his partner asked if it was her. He left the profession after that and suffered from the memory for 12 years before being diagnosed with PTSD.

Recognizing he wasn't the only one struggling, Savoia founded the Tema Conter Memorial Trust (TEMA) in 2001 to raise awareness for PTSD. Frustrated with the lack of available numbers, TEMA began keeping track of suicides in the first responder community on Apr. 28, 2014 and releasing them to the media.

"We felt that this needed to be done because we felt that this needed to be on the radar," Savoia told VICE. "Whether or not provincial governments are keeping track, again, we haven't been made aware. If they are smart they should be keeping track of what's happening in their provinces because it is an issue."

The numbers that TEMA reports are tragic. Every month, first responders all over the country are hurting themselves, sometimes fatally, to escape their PTSD. While the majority of media outlets have been recently been reporting this information as a shocking spike in suicides, the reality is far more unsettling.

This isn't a spike. It is an ongoing trend in Canada that has been quietly accepted as the norm in the first responder community. In 2014, there were more suicides among police, fire, and paramedic divisions (22) than in the military (19). Since TEMA began keeping track of first responder suicides in April of 2014, that number has risen to 26, including six paramedics, five firefighters, and 15 police officers. All but one of these were men, and the majority (17) happened in Ontario. What's more shocking is that those numbers would have gone unreported if it wasn't for TEMA.

If Savoia hadn't started recording and distributing these statistics, the public would still be ignorant of the actual price our first line pays for PTSD. The organizations that should have been keeping these numbers, and keeping Canada's uniformed safe, have failed to do so. According to Alberta Health Services, employee suicides "haven't been a statistic [AHS] has tracked since it began providing EMS service in 2009. We don't believe the previous providers tracked that either." WSIB keeps the number of PTSD claims approved in Ontario but not who filed them or what department they came from. The OPP did not to respond to numerous request to talk about this story and their policies.

We have a responsibility to the men and women in uniform to keep them safe, because they would do the same for us. By not keeping the numbers, we haven't kept our side of the deal. Accurate statistics on first responder suicides could have been used to implement better policies and protect more members, but no one in government is recording these numbers. TEMA, with their limited resources, is effectively doing someone else's job.

Roméo Dallaire, retired lieutenant-general and the honorary head of the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Association of Canada, agreed with Savoia that accurate statistics need to be kept. Dallaire led United Nations peacekeepers in Rwanda during the brutal genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus and his experience there left him suicidal and depressed. Dallaire struggled with his PTSD for years, attempting suicide four times, and has since become an outspoken advocate for better mental health treatment in the armed forces.

"There was this philosophy for a long time that the less you talk about suicide the better," Dallaire says."You didn't want to give the give the impression it might be OK or even glorify it.

"That, to me, was one of the most horrific mistakes we made. We have to tell people that good people are killing themselves and that there is a reason for it. We had better get at it and make sure others don't suffer the same fate."

He says the military had come a long way since he started advocating for better PTSD treatment in 1997. Dallaire believes the treatment of first responders in Canada is still years behind the military's practices.

"First responders are still at stage one," Dallaire explains. "They've just made the realization that these people are vulnerable, that they are being taken for granted, and that they won't be able to carry on."

Despite the shockingly underreported statistics TEMA has collected, Dallaire remains optimistic that changes are coming in first responder organizations.

"In police forces, firefighters, medical, even teachers, there's a desire to provide much more," he says. "The difficulty is convincing people that the injured aren't sick, they're injured, and that you don't get rid of them, you support them and you can bring them back."

It's a small but significant difference. Dallaire explains that first responders and military personnel exist in an atmosphere that is, "in essence, Darwinian." The men and women in uniform are proud of their responsibilities. In those organizations, admitting to mental health issues can be seen as showing weakness. He compares the stigma of reporting PTSD as a first responder today to the stigma faced by military personnel 18 years ago.

"PTSD is tolerated even less in these organizations than it is in the general population because they demand such a high standard. It makes it hard for these guys to feel like they're being supported," says Dallaire. "One of the things we did in the military was we called it an 'operational stress injury.' An injury. These people aren't sick, they don't have a disease—it's an injury. So how do you treat an injury? You treat it with the same sense of urgency as a physical injury. You get in there early and you take care of it.

"Secondly, you treat it as honourable. There's no shame in being injured psychologically. It took a lot of work to convince people who said, 'You know, I was injured, I've lost an arm.' This guy has lost his mind, he's injured too."

The stigma is real and it is dangerous. In 2012, Ontario Ombudsman André Marin released a report that investigated suicide and depression in the OPP. The 158-page document, titled In The Line Of Duty, found that 23 OPP officers had committed suicide from 1989 to 2012. Excerpts from "Over The Blue Wall," the personal memoir of an officer named "Henry," were published in the report.

"Everything from picking up people's parts from under subway trains, to kids' pieces from under cars, to checking dead and suicide victims for identification or evidence… I had seen and done it all, and like a good policeman, putting personal feelings up on the emotional shelf where it belonged, to be dealt with later, much later, when that time would be… no one, including me, knew…"

Officer Henry applied for and successfully received benefits from the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) to treat his psychological injuries, but in 2005 his benefits were challenged by fellow officers.

"We respectfully point out that this case once more illustrates the urgent need for review of entitlement for traumatic mental stress benefits, and demands that the WSIB stop wasting the taxpayers' money in this fashion," a unit commander wrote to the WSIB after Henry began attending community events again. Prior to this, Henry had spent months alone in his bedroom, only leaving when recommended by his doctor. He kept his benefits, but the accusations hurt.

Officer Henry killed himself in 2009.

Marin supplied the OPP with 28 recommendations in 2012. Echoing Dallaire and Savoia, Marin called for accurate statistics to be kept regarding officer suicides and slammed the OPP for not keeping them sooner. Unfortunately, the majority of Marin's recommendations have not been followed.

As noted above, the OPP did not respond to requests to talk about this story.

On January 26 of this year, Greg Turner, husband, father of two, and paramedic of 16 years took his own life after a shift at Edmonton's Kildale neighbourhood dispatch station. He was 41. It was the fourth first-responder suicide in Canada that month.

"I am broken," wrote his wife, Bridget, in an emotional Facebook post. "I know in my heart that this was not a choice. He did not choose death over us. Depression made that choice for him and it was a battle he was too sick to fight. It is a disease that kills without the right treatment, just like cancer."

An anonymous letter from an Edmonton first responder published online by the Edmonton Sun in February brutally reinforces the fact that this problem is widespread in the community. In it, the author struggles with his own PTSD and praises Turner for his bravery.

"I wish I could tell you today that after all I've gone through with the mental health system (I've barely scratched the surface of my experience of the system in this letter) that I've been cured but the honest truth is that I will never be cured," the letter read.

"I will live with my depression and other mental illness until the day I die, I will forever be plagued by the thoughts that I should have done my wife and kids a favour and went out like Greg did long ago instead of subjecting them to a life lived with a person who no longer has emotion happy or sad thanks to depression and or the drugs that treat it. I will continue to feel a bit of jealousy each time a news story airs of a first responder who has committed suicide or was killed in the line of duty, and I'll continue to wish that I too could have been killed in the line of duty so my family would have the memory of all the uniforms at my funeral and they could be proud of how I left earth.

"Instead even though the real me died at work years ago my family is stuck with an empty shell of the man I was, and even though I try my best to be the man they deserve I always feel they deserve more."

Stress injuries cause tremendous strain on the victim and their families. But experts point out that support from those closest to the victim—their family and peers—is critical to treating the injury. Dallaire explains the relationship between professional treatment and peer support.

"If you have a meeting with a psychiatrist once a week, and you are feeling the hurt during the week, the peers are there to listen, to respond, to fight those urges to self-destruct because a lot of people forget that those urges, and PTSD, can be terminal."

Dallaire goes on to explain the stigma from the point of view of someone who had battled with mental health injuries in the past.

"Those who are in uniform, they wear that uniform because they want to be distinctive and do a job," he says. "They feel they are part of an organization and that they have a responsibility to that organization. That they have a responsibility to perform."

That sense of responsibility drives first responders to do brave and heroic things every day. But that same sense of responsibility, that determination to keep working and keep saving and keep ignoring the psychological damage, is killing them.

Twenty-six first responders that we know of have taken their own lives between April 29, 2014, and today. That statistic isn't cherry picked. It's currently the only number we have, and it's an average of one suicide every two weeks.

There will be more. And most won't be reported. There is an officer, a paramedic, a firefighter, who is struggling right now to hide their injuries. They are suffering and will not survive the year.

Tomorrow, all over the country, Canadians will dial 911 and call for help.

And even though it's killing them, help will come.

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