One of the most proactive actions any emergency services member can take to reduce their risk of suffering from PTSD is making themselves exceptionally competent at their job.
Before you write me off as out of touch and unrealistic, let me tell you I’m a graduate of the IAFF’s Center of Excellence, which is an inpatient mental health and substance abuse facility in Maryland, U.S.A., specializing in the treatment of firefighters.
I spent 38 days there in the summer of 2025. While that statement doesn’t equate to formal mental health education, it does make me intimately familiar with the problem and the people who are going through these struggles. This solution isn’t proposed from a place of judgment (quite the opposite), this is offered from a place of understanding, and a desperate desire to see future generations of fire service members avoid this crisis. In no way is this trying to blame the people struggling for their own problems, rather, it’s seeking to empower us all to take control of the variables we can control in hopes of increasing our resiliency through preparation.
I’ve found, in my experience, and heard so often through the testimony of others, that the calls that haunt us are less often horrifically gruesome, but rather the times we fail to live up to the expectations set for us from ourselves, our department, and/or the communities we serve.
Competence Builds Confidence
When we’ve failed in our preparation we find ourselves helpless in those moments. We’re desperate to assist but we lack the skillset to be helpful. This, too often, is the reason for our distress.
In the hours, days, weeks or years that follow, we find ourselves considering ways it could have gone better, or the things we wish we could have done differently.
The more we dedicate ourselves to the tradecraft of firefighting, the more difficult it becomes for our own minds to convince us our actions deserve further consideration. Moreover, if and when we do continue considering our actions following traumatic calls, we find, confidently, that our actions were fully and completely appropriate.
That last portion is the key. Our resiliency is fostered by our confidence, and in turn true confidence is built by competence. Too often, as members of the fire service, we bury our response concerns under a layer of arrogance and pride, not because we don’t know the truth, but because the discomfort of recognizing our failures, either publicly or privately, would only seem to increase the pain.
Accountability Drives Improvement
Mistakes and inadequacies are bound to occur, there’s no possible way for us to prepare for all the ways the world can be chaotic, unfair and tragic. I argue we owe it to our communities, ourselves and the fire service as a whole to carry that burden. As we bear that weight, we constantly rededicate ourselves to never repeat our failures, and to prevent those around us from making the same mistakes we’ve made. This should be the heart of why we should train in the emergency services.
It’s for this reason that I feel our tailboards and after-action reviews are one of the most critical functions for a department to get correct. They drive accountability, which drives training, but most importantly, they drive our purpose. When we start focusing our efforts more on areas of improvement and naming our errors, however small they may be, you will watch the culture of your organization shift for the better.
We can build a community that thrives on our organization’s mission rather than personal egos. No longer will the concern be hiding our mistakes in the shadows, but now every mistake is to be illuminated as a lesson to learn from.
I challenge you, think back: have you ever encountered anyone who publicly acknowledged their own mistakes and offered them up to be learned from and had that be viewed negatively? That’s a completely unfounded fear inside the fire service. I argue that anyone with that trait is not only not rejected, but revered. As I tell the people I mentor, this is a trait that “makes your stock rise.”
Training With Purpose
Perhaps the quest for the perfect, untarnished response is doomed to be an eternal journey just beyond our reach, but in that we find our purpose. Simply, our purpose is to be better than we were before, and that’s a noble cause. As we chase this goal we find all the little steps toward perfection, however feeble they may seem, do matter. They matter to the person trapped in a bedroom, praying someone will come for them, and they matter to the responder lying in their bed at night, knowing that while they can’t prevent the horrors of this world, they can come to the aid of people who desperately need the help they swore they would provide. The more we take this commission seriously, the more we find contentment in our actions.
That contentment is directly proportional to the work that is put in before the skillset is needed. Once it’s time to act, the time to train has passed.
In the winter of 2024, I rescued three unconscious children from a house fire, in total, seven unconscious people were removed from the house that night. Unfortunately, despite our success at the scene, four of the seven died in the weeks that followed that fire. I have spent more hours than you could imagine replaying those minutes in my head, breaking down the response to the finest granules and often speaking of some of the things I would likely do differently if given the opportunity. But more than anything, after all the deliberation, I’m proud and content with the preparation I had taken leading me to that day.
I remember talking to my wife in the days that followed that call and saying, “Even if I never use that skillset again, all the time spent training was worth it.”
You’ll never know when it will be the day you get your number called, and my prayer for you is that you take this job seriously enough that when it happens, you’ll be harder to hurt.
