Public Safety committee  I'll just say, and I think Dr. Ferguson can speak to this also, I think that with the upswing in media attention, as there has come to be more of a public conversation about shootings and use of force by police and the idea of police brutality and so forth, the mental health of officers has become more of a focus.

Public Safety committee  Again, I think it's critical that officers are given all the tools. We can't reduce the number of calls they have to go to, obviously, and they have to walk into situations that all of us would probably run from. That's just part of their job. I think that what's critical for unions is to support evidence-based prevention interventions.

Public Safety committee  I'm very hopeful that if we start in use-of-force training with these concepts, the physiological arousal, and when it gets to a certain level, and we use those words, those are the same kinds of symptoms—hyperarousal and so forth—that you see in PTSD. If we can start getting people comfortable with talking about these things when they're in their most macho kind of environment, in use-of-force training, then we can find ways of transitioning that into help-seeking behaviour peer to peer and so forth.

Public Safety committee  Well, I can't speak to a specific psychometric test that would identify individuals who are more at risk. We can see more risky biological trajectories. Among some of the officers I tested, there were those who were running at extreme stress responses for their whole workday, which is extremely risky not only for their health but also for getting OSI or PTSD.

Public Safety committee  I think there are gaps because there has been so little research, so we don't know. If there were more funding to do research, a number of researchers would be happy to start working with all of these different areas and collecting objective data so that we could know the differences between them.

Public Safety committee  I'll just say that for the prevention part, a lot has been about the language. I mean, coming from a psychologist background, at first when I started working with first responders, with police, I used words like “mental” and “relaxation” and so forth, and it was clearly no. They didn't accept that.

Public Safety committee  Actually, one of my advisers at one of the veterans hospitals I worked with was studying substance use and PTSD. To summarize her research, not mine, she found that sometimes when you take something like that, or alcohol, it can calm the symptoms in the moment, but then there can be bounceback anxiety.

Public Safety committee  Just to clarify, there is a difference between prevention training, that is, before someone has OSI and PTSD, and post-therapeutic training. I know Ms. Ferguson can speak about the “post” and the “pre”. Since we're looking at the biology of stress responses and intervening at that level, I would imagine everybody's stress response physiology is similar.

Public Safety committee  Again, I would caution the committee on this, because there's no evidence base that shows that. Online, PowerPoint, and web-based training can bring awareness about PTSD and OSI, but we know from the neurobiology of learning that if you want to link rational thought—how you should do something, or what you know you should do—with the motor movements and how you should do those in high-stress incidents, you have to practise them together, and that means actively.

Public Safety committee  I'll just speak to the prevention side. We've studied both women officers and men officers. We've hooked them up with the biological data. We find that when they're starting to encounter training or real-world critical incidents, all of their physiological responses and stress hormones—cortisol and adrenaline—as well as heart rate and breathing, can skyrocket similarly.

Public Safety committee  Thank you for inviting me here today. I'm here to speak about evidence-based interventions to prevent OSI and PTSD among first responders. My background includes more than a decade of working with first responders, combat veterans, and police, both as a research scientist in two U.S. veterans hospitals and most recently as an academic at the University of Toronto.