Wright County Sheriff's Office launches new program to track responders mental health

We all know that if you're in law enforcement, that carries a lot of stressors with it. Sometimes stressors that compound and stick with you and can linger. The idea of wellness in law enforcement has been a big topic of conversation in recent years. How do you tackle that? What do you do about it? How do you track it? Well, in Washington County, the sheriff's office now is launching something to really try to get a handle on that. and it's unique. And so we wanna talk more about that created by an administrator within the office. Shauna Athman, Athman is the correct pronunciation? Atman. Atman, okay. Yep. Well, thank you for being with us today. This is interesting. Explain, and you did this with existing tools that you have, is a way to track calls and to categorize them and log them. I mean, explain what you have developed here, what it does. So we've developed two things. One is a PTSD tracker that's based off a scientific study that allows officers to track their own careers. And so we encourage them to put it on their personal phone. It's a complicated spreadsheet to build, but it's not a complicated spreadsheet to use so it will alert them if the severity or the frequency or if both are getting too high and alert them to let them know they need to do some kind of mitigation now for some people that's going fishing and for other people that's taking a mental health appointment or a series of mental health appointments what we know about PTSD now that we didn't know before is that it's fully treatable. So we just need people to help recognize when they're hitting those areas. And PTSD and depression are five times more prevalent in law enforcement than they are in the general population. So the way this system works here, so you mentioned a spreadsheet. So I understand it tracks calls for service to all deputies and dispatchers to determine who is most likely to suffer depression, anxiety, or burnout using predictive analytics. So how does that work? By tracking, is it both the frequency and the types? I mean, what are you looking for to analyze this? So in the second system that you're talking about where we're targeting depression, burnout, and anxiety, that just gives every CFS you attend a score. So we have it for patrol and we have it for dispatch. What that allows us to do is to refocus the peer support team into here's the top 20 from last month. Let's go take a look at them. Let's go have a conversation with them. Or we can see in one of the graphs that I have, I can look at an individual's total call volume. Well, you had a lot of deaths last month. So let's come talk to me now and let's see if we need to get you an actual appointment with a mental health provider just based on what you're seeing. They're both simplistic tools. They were both built with systems that we already had. So they only cost us the time and the staffing time to build them. They're fully duplicatable. And the spreadsheet, of course, could be spread anywhere because it's already ready. Interesting. And I noted in some of the information I read about this is that you noted that even a traffic stop because it has elements of unknown can add stress. Correct. We find that our high traffic stop people do tend to hit a burnout level faster than our average traffic stop people, just because every traffic stop can go wrong. You don't know what you're going to be interacting with. You think it's a simple speeding citation or even a speed warning and it turns into something totally different. How long have you been using this now? So the PTSD tracker actually just rolled out to the full team this week because we had a mental health speaker come in. So that is brand new. We had rolled it out for the last three months to our new hires because the reality is our younger people coming in are going to be way more likely to use it than the people who already have 20 years on the job. This was, you had mentioned I think at one point that there was something similar, was it in Dubuque, Iowa? I mean, you developed this again, but there were some inspirations potentially for it? Absolutely, I was at a summit listening to a speaker about wellness and he made one statement about predictive analytics. And I left and I said, well, I know how to do that. And that was the burnout and anxiety tracker. And then I emailed that speaker and I said, you've said somebody's doing this. I want to know who. And Dubuque, Iowa graciously gave me their spreadsheet. Their spreadsheet was built off. Ours is a different version of theirs, but theirs is the original. And theirs tracked their entire department on one spreadsheet, ours tracks individuals. Because at any given time, I have 175 to 180 officers. Have you had interest now from other law enforcement agencies after hearing about what you are launching here and how to duplicate it? Yes, absolutely. And again, the best part is I can say, this is gonna take you a couple staffing hours and updates, but it's ready to go. You can have it. All you have to do is ask for it. If they wanna reach out to me, I can explain the process to them. Even some of the steps that we did to get the anxiety tracker, I can talk them through those and let them know what we're seeing. Let's talk about how things have changed. I think you mentioned 20 years ago, if a law enforcement officer admitted to having anything job related depression or anxiety, it was viewed as a sign of weakness. a lot of these things went unknown. Yeah, absolutely. It wasn't. I mean, when I started in the field 20 years ago, it was just starting to hit the point where we're like, okay, we need to be talking about something. We need to be doing something. That's when peer support teams really took off. I was given the great opportunity by State Patrol where I worked at the time to join their peer support team and then really got interested in law enforcement mental well-being because the job physically changes your brain. It changes your brain chemistry. It changes your brain composition. And the average person has four or five critical incidents in their lifetime, whereas an average officer will see 450. And the officer that I saw speak yesterday, his score was over 2,000. Wow, wow. So again, something that people stayed silent about, didn't want to admit stress or anxiety. How much has that changed now? How open are deputies and officers and others, dispatchers, into admitting what they're feeling once you start tracking? We're getting there. This is the best part about it, having been in the field for 20 plus years, and knowing that that conversation started back then, it's now really catching up. My sheriff is very open about some of his emotional struggles through his career, as is my chief. And the more high-powered, more visible people that we have willing to say, hey, I had a blip in my career. I had a blip where I wasn't 100% okay, and I had to do something about it the more that comes the better off we're going to be and with these tools that we're rolling out now we won't really know the effect of them until 10 or 20 years from now because the average PTSD claim is 42 but we can roll it out and truthfully i would love nothing more than to roll it out to other agencies and have somebody come back and be like hey i did that and I made it better. Shawna, thank you so much for taking time to explain this. Very interesting. We'd love to catch back up with you down the road to see your report card on the effectiveness of this. Yeah, I really appreciate you guys taking the time to let me speak about it.