A new study from researchers at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences indicates that boosting the mental health of police officers could help to decrease the number of incidents involving police aggression toward people with serious mental illnesses.
"About a quarter of police fatalities involve a person who has serious mental illness, like schizophrenia," said Amy Weisman de Mamani, the lead researcher and a professor in the Department of Psychology. "So, we really wanted to understand why these interactions go wrong."
Something that also caught Weisman de Mamani's attention in the existing research is that as a group, police officers are psychologically distressed in part because they are exposed to trauma in their line of work. "In theory, when people are not well, they are less able to regulate their emotions, particularly in stressful moments. They are also more likely to displace that onto someone else," she added.
Working with a team of psychology Ph.D. students, including Salman Ahmad, Denise Chung-Zou, Merranda McLaughlin, Genesis Saenz Escalante, and Zachary Goodman, Weisman de Mamani found that police officers who experience psychological distress are more likely to view someone with schizophrenia negatively. This stigma could potentially impact their behavior.
"There are strong associations in the directions that we expected: the more distressed emotions officers felt or suicidal ideation or behavior they exhibited, the more likely they were to stigmatize people with serious mental illness," said Weisman de Mamani.
The team used a mixed methods approach of analyzing survey and qualitative data from 107 officers. They only recruited male officers because the majority of police officers are male and almost all violent incidents between civilians and police officers involve male officers. The survey consisted of scales measuring mental illness stigma, depression, anxiety, stress, suicidal behaviors, and social justice attitudes.
"Interestingly, when we looked at social justice attitudes, there was no main effect linking police officers' social justice attitudes to their stigma toward people with schizophrenia," Weisman de Mamani said. "However, we found that psychological distress and suicidal ideation both moderated the link between social justice attitudes and stigma. Specifically, when police officers' distress and suicidal ideation were low, social justice attitudes were associated with lower stigma toward individuals with schizophrenia. However, when police officers' distress and suicidal ideation were high, social justice attitudes were not associated with stigma. Thus, conscientious values like social justice mindedness may not protect officers against holding stigmatized views of those with mental illness if officers themselves are feeling mentally unwell."
The findings have important societal implications, calling attention to the need to increase mental health support for police officers. This support, the findings suggest, could help to lower the number of police-induced deaths that involve people with serious mental illnesses. Increased mental health support could also improve or even save the lives of officers, who experience exceedingly high rates of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and attempted suicide, as well as death by suicide.
Engaging in this research project reinforced to Weisman de Mamani and her team that working as a police officer is an incredibly stressful job, and that many officers fear they will lose their jobs if they acknowledge that they are experiencing psychological distress.
Weisman de Mamani believes that "giving officers the resources they need, including time off to recover from traumatic events and the assurance of confidentiality and job security if they seek mental health assistance, could make a real difference. If officers are not in the form to do their jobs with a clear mind, the constituents they serve are going to suffer. We need to create better access to evidence-based treatments for our officers."
In the long term, Weisman de Mamani hopes to build interventions that are tailored to police culture by involving experts such as retired police officers and police chiefs.
Weisman de Mamani's study was recently published in Stigma and Health, an academic journal from the American Psychological Association. Her research was supported by a Provost's Research Award from the Office of the Vice Provost for Research & Scholarship and by a Flipse Award through the Department of Psychology.
