This book explores the stress faced by public safety professionals across an array of occupational fields, such as police, correctional officers, paramedics, and firefighters.
Bringing together leading scholars from around the world, it showcases cutting-edge quantitative and qualitative research from across three continents and multiple regions within six countries, introduces key concepts related to occupational and organizational stressors, and provides an overview of the state of current research in key topic areas. Those who have yet to be exposed to the concepts associated with occupational stress injuries, or to the range of theories and methodologies, will be provided with an informative introduction to this topic. It explores the state of current literature on this topic, identifies gaps in our knowledge and approaches to understanding the relationship between occupational stressors and different outcomes, and provides potential responses for reducing or ameliorating occupational stressors experienced by public safety personnel.
Aimed at students, academic researchers, public safety practitioners, law enforcement analysts, and public policy-makers, this book will appeal to readers who have some knowledge in this area and are interested in learning more about new and emerging research, as well as those who are well-versed on this topic.
Introduction to Occupational Stress Injuries: Operational and Organizational Stressors among Public Safety Personnel Part I: Police 1. “It Does Screw with Your Mental State”: The Occupational Experiences of Detachment Services Assistants Working for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police 2. Police Procedurals’ Construction of Unrealistic Images of Policing: Implications for Officer Stress 3. Community relations, workplace stress and well-being in the context of mass demonstrations, defunding, and anti-police sentiment: A national study of the experiences of United States law enforcement 4. Secondary Trauma in Police Officers Investigating Child Sexual Exploitation Materials Part II: Corrections 5. The Practical and Emotional Demands of Working with Women on Probation 6. Burning out in Probation: An Exploration of Organizational, Operational, and Personal Stressors amongst Probation Workers in England and Wales 7. Evaluating Workplace Stress in Correctional Services Part III: Firefighters 8. The Link Between Stress and Cardiac Outcomes in Firefighters: An Example of Critical Analysis of Causation 9. Overview of Stress and Firefighter Mental Health 10. An Integrative Review to Develop the Unified Neuromatrix Allostatic Load and Resiliency Model (UNALARM) and Apply it to the Health of Firefighters and Other Public Safety Personnel 11. Social media as an occupational stressor: The impact of social media on the mental health and occupational performance of volunteer firefighters and other public safety personnel Part IV: Public Safety Personnel 12. Hitting the mark: A survey process framework for informing evidence-based organizational responses to the psychological health needs of public safety employees 13. The Impact of Organizational Culture of the Mental Well-being of Public Safety Communicators 14. Family First: The Potential Value of Training Family Members to Provide Psychological First Aid (PFA) to their First Responders 15. Exploring the Effects of PSP Careers on Families Conclusion: Knowledge and Ways Forward
Rosemary Ricciardelli is Professor in the School of Maritime Studies, and Research Chair in Safety, Security, and Wellness, at Memorial University’s Fisheries and Marine Institute, Canada. Elected to the Royal Society of Canada, and a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, her research centres on evolving understandings of gender, vulnerabilities, risk, and experiences and issues within different facets of the criminal justice system. Joy C. MacDermid is Professor in the School of Physical Therapy at Western University, Canada, and the Scientific Director of FIREWELL, an independent knowledge translation platform and research collaborative with firefighters. Her research includes public safety personnel and Veteran health, work injury, and implementation science. Lorna Ferguson is a Banting Postdoctoral Researcher at Memorial University of Newfoundland and is the Founder of the Missing Persons Research Hub. Lorna has a broad interest in policing research and developing evidence-based approaches to policing and crime prevention, including issues related to search and rescue, incident command, crime concentration, cybercrime, and persons with mental illness. Currently, she focuses on police responses to missing person cases. .