Rookies Hear Frank Suicide Talk From Cop’s Survivor

To Protect and Serve is what they intend to do, but maybe the word "Survive" should be added to that slogan. When you think of what they put themselves through on a daily basis, it should be obvious that sooner or later, it will all pile up on their minds.

When they die in the line of duty, it is a tragic price paid but we pass it off as they knew it would be possible considering the dangerous jobs they have, but when they die as a result of doing their jobs by their own hands, we tend to ignore all they have gone through.

My husband's brother-in-law was a cop in Massachusetts. He had a "drinking problem" and was often violent as a nasty drunk. His family was always on edge one way or the other. Either they were afraid he wouldn't come home from work because of his job or they were afraid he'd come home drunk because of his job. Either way, they felt lost.

When my husband's nephew was just a young teenager, he came home from school one day and found his father in his uniform on the floor in a pool of blood. He shot himself. A few years later, this same teenager was in Vietnam.

While there is a danger associated with police work, we also need to factor in the fact that many in the National Guards and Reserves are also police officers. When we talk about dwell time in between deployments, these men and women spend their dwell time with their lives on the line on a daily basis. They never have time to readjust back into peaceful life.

Here is a story about a cop that wanted to stay on the job no matter what happened to him before. It ended up costing him his family and ultimately his life.

The government estimates that up to 6 percent of cops have diagnosable PTSD. In 2008, there were 141 police suicides across the country, which is higher than the national average.

Rookies Hear Frank Suicide Talk From Cop’s Survivor
by Abram Katz Mar 18, 2010 7:48 am


Janice McCarthy carries a certain melancholy that few radiate but the spouses and survivors of a police officer’s suicide.

McCarthy carried that melancholy this week to the New Haven Police Academy this week. She spoke to cadets and supervisors about stress, post traumatic stress disorder, and suicide, which frequently follows unless the cycle is somehow broken.

Tuesday was McCarthy’s third visit in as many weeks to the police academy on the Sherman Parkway, to tackle a problem that confronts too many cops yet doesn’t often make it into their training curriculum.

“It’s very healing for me to do this,” she said.

McCarthy spoke to 35 supervisors for about 2 hours, and to 40 cadets for an hour and a half. It was part of an effort by Lt. Ray Hassett (pictured above with McCarthy) to prepare budding cops to recognize and deal with signs of post-traumatic stress on the job.

McCarthy, 46 and the mother of three, told the officers and cadets about the traumas that her former husband, Paul McCarthy, endured before shooting himself in the chest at about 7:30 p.m. at the junction of Route 28 and Interstate 95, in Canton, about 30 miles southwest of Boston.

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Rookies Hear Frank Suicide Talk From Cops Survivor

The police suicide problem
Being a cop is a dangerous job -- and not just for the obvious reasons. Suicide kills more officers every year than homicides or accidents at work. But what does society owe the families of those for whom this high-stress job is too much to take? One widow answers: respect.
By Julia Dahl
January 24, 2010

Early on the afternoon of July 28, 2006, Captain Paul McCarthy of the Massachusetts State Police put on his blue trooper uniform, holstered his gun, and got into the driver’s seat of his police cruiser. McCarthy was despondent, exhausted from 13 years of physical and emotional pain. It all began on an overtime shift back in 1993: a snowy March midnight when a man driving a stolen MBTA bus bulldozed his cruiser, crushing his legs and trapping him inside the vehicle. After that came the surgeries and months spent learning to walk again. He fought hard and, defying doctors’ predictions, after a year and a half made it back to active duty in the only job he’d ever wanted.

Paul McCarthy began stuttering and picking fights at work. He was diagnosed in 1994 with post-traumatic stress disorder, and for years, Janice says, she begged her husband to quit. She nursed him through three more on-the-job injuries and shouldered most of the work of raising their children while he kept passing promotion exams and sinking deeper into mental illness. His supervisors made a record of his “bizarre” behavior, and in 2001 Paul was suspended, Janice says, and had his gun confiscated while he underwent yet another psychiatric evaluation. A department doctor wrote then that while Paul was “technically fit” for duty, “it is more likely than not that he will deteriorate when he returns to his former setting.” Still, he was cleared for duty, given his gun, and sent back to work.

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The police suicide problem