Why Mental Fitness Training is the Next Evolution of the Fire Service – Or Needs to Be
It’s time to treat mental fitness as a trainable, job‑critical skill so firefighters are prepared for the psychological demands of the job
A beautiful thing about the fire service is that there are many mentors and role models that we meet along the way. One of my first role models was an instructor I had in fire college. I looked up to him, and I wanted to be just like him as I moved through my career, he was funny, sarcastic (a requirement of a good firefighter), had a ton of experience, and he knew his stuff. He taught us about what mattered, from how to put out a fire to how to be a good rookie and earn the respect of your crew.
I was in shock, years later, when I learned he had died by suicide. I had lost contact with him over the years, but nonetheless, the news really shook me. In the aftermath of his passing, which was fairly early in my career, the question arose: are we training for the dark side, or the mental and emotional impact of this job? There’s a lot to learn from the giants who have come before us and actions speak louder than words.
We train for just about everything in this job, even the calls that most departments rarely see. Crews spend hours training in technical rescue, swiftwater, and confined-space operations, even though, for most organizations, they may only attend one or two of these types of calls per year.
Training for Rare Risks, But Not the Common Ones
However, we understand the importance of being prepared for these unique situations. They aren’t normal, not even to most firefighters, but they are part of the job, and because of that, we train very consistently. We do this because the skill required to conduct these specialty operations is vast. We spend hours each week training to enhance our skills that we may only get to put into practice a few times in our careers.
This kind of training speaks to the high expectations that we have as firefighters and the pride that we carry in being prepared for even the most unexpected situations. When it comes to training, firefighters want to be prepared. After every line of duty death, (LODD), we go to extreme lengths to find ways that we could have saved the firefighter we lost.
We find the flaws, discover ways we could have saved our brother or sister and then we incorporate that skill into our regular training. Every firefighter will do whatever they can to avoid the next LODD, we learn from our mistakes and we are always finding ways to keep our people alive.
We Evolve After Physical Loss, Why Not Mental Loss?
This is why we believe that mental fitness is the next evolution of mental health training in the fire service, or why it needs to be. You’ve seen the “wellness days,” the mental health stand-downs, the posters on the station bulletin board, the online mental health programs that disappear as soon as the shift bell rings.
We’ve turned mental health into checkboxes, not training. Some departments have broken the mold and moved on to operationalizing their wellness training, while others have still never done mental health training. The reality is most departments have only trained one to two times in a mental health program, ever. We are great at preaching slogans, “you need to talk about it,” but it’s the action and accountability that seem to be missing.
When I started looking deeper, when I talked with chiefs, captains, instructors, and firefighters across the globe, one question kept coming back: Do we even know how to talk about our own mental health? We keep telling our firefighters to talk, but most organizations haven’t spent much, or any time, training their firefighters on how to talk or on how to take care of their mental health. We are hoping that they will take advantage of the resources and support provided to them, but we haven’t trained them to develop their skill set in this space. So that when the unique situation of a mental health crisis shows up, they will be prepared to deal with it.
The Moment It All Changed for Me
In the moment I learned of my instructor’s passing, the slogan “You need to talk about it” suddenly felt painfully inadequate.
Not because talking wasn’t important, but because it wasn’t a skill we had been trained to do.
We train for the job, we train for safety procedures, we train for physical fitness, we are told that we “need to talk about our mental health,” but where is the training?
Everywhere you look in the fire service, we say we value mental health. We hold seminars, establish committees, hand out one-off resources, and even provide mental health or wellness programs, typically offered as a voluntary or one-time classroom session. While these all have the potential to offer great values and share important messages, without consistency, they become a one-off session, usually without follow-up and often never revisited. It seems that most organizations are leaving most wellness to the firefighter. Our research showed that few fire departments are actually consistent in their wellness training; most check a box and move on, hoping the message will stick.
What we are seeing from this approach to wellness:
Cumulative stress burnout
Crews who can’t talk about anything deeper than the weather
Leaders who want to help but feel unequipped
Or leaders who are checking boxes and ignoring the issues
Members who sit in silence because they don’t know how to start
Unlike all other areas of firefighter training.
We wait for problems.
We react to breakdowns.
We treat the injury instead of training to prevent it.
That’s not training. That’s hoping.
What If We Trained Mental Fitness Like Physical Fitness?
Think about it: we don’t wait to hurt ourselves to wear our PPE, we don’t wait for apparatus to run out of fuel before refueling and we don’t show up on the fireground without rehearsing every drill or skill a hundred times.
The funny, or sad part, depending on how you look at it, is that in the fire service, we understand that prevention isn’t a checkbox, it’s a discipline.
If we treat mental health like fitness instead of therapy, everything starts to change. We stop hopping; a poster or a one-week stand-down will save us, and we actually start treating mental health training as a discipline, not just an afterthought.
Mental Fitness Is a Discipline
When we treat mental fitness as a skill, we give firefighters tools and techniques they can actually use in real life to regulate stress under pressure, to reset after tough calls, and bring these skills into their personal lives, for their families, and for themselves. We are continuing to lose firefighters to suicide, and psychological injury is not slowing down. The real question here is, What are you doing for the safety of your firefighters, physical and psychological?
Mental fitness isn’t the “Talking about it” part, talking about your mental health can feel overwhelming and might be best left to the professionals. That’s what therapy is for. Mental fitness is training. It’s learning how to recognize what’s going on inside you and regulate it before it spills over, before the short fuse, before the blow-ups, before putting an axe through the dishwasher at work because you’re pissed off. It’s fewer negative kitchen-table conversations, stronger relationships, and showing up steady and ready for the next tough call or hard conversation.
Skills That Change the Firehouse
The fire service has never resisted training, but the training has to be relevant, it has to be connected to what we do, and it helps if it comes from another firefighter, someone who understands the ins and outs.
If it gets thrown on a shelf and check-boxed, then kiss it goodbye. It has to be trained, in the same manner we train for rescue, fires, medicals and physical safety; woven into the fabric of our organizations as a part of who we are and what we do.
Firefighters understand the mental weight of this job better than anyone; the stress, the losses, the cumulative toll. We’re the ones marching in the parades and burying our friends. This work is heavy, and while some of it is unavoidable, some of it isn’t, and those are the parts we should fight like hell to prevent
The truth is, you can train for mental fitness the same way you train for physical fitness and firefighter skills, and it matters a lot.
Mental fitness isn’t a program. It’s a movement. And it’s already underway.
Brandon Evans is a retired firefighter and executive director of the Fire to Light Foundation;the perspective shared here is informed by his broader work in firefighter mental fitness training and research. Following the loss of a mentor early in his career, this work evolved into a focus on preventive, skills-based mental fitness education within the fire service. That work is carried out through the Fire to Light Foundation, which focuses on training, education, and research to help departments approach mental fitness as a repeatable, job-relevant skill. Departments and individuals interested in learning more or exploring involvement can reach out directly: support@firetolightfoundation.org
