If you or someone you know needs help, call or text the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
The Best Western Hotel in Casper was the place. Cowboy country was the music. And the mental wellbeing of Wyoming’s first responders was the theme.
From Aug. 5 to 7, firefighters, therapists, police officers, EMS workers, at least one coroner and several therapy dogs converged on the Built for Battle conference to talk about mental health and the stigma around addressing it.
“Friends in Low Places” by Brooks Jefferson played through some speakers. In between sessions, conference leaders raffled off boxes of Michelob Ultra and coffee mugs.
People like Chris McDonald, a senior investigator at the state fire marshal’s office and former leader of the Wyoming Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force (ICAC), said this conversation would’ve been unthinkable when he started working around 25 years ago.
“ It would never come up,” said McDonald. “You suck it up. You're going to see bad stuff all the time. Suck it up. We don't want to hear about it.”
Almost 30% of first responders experience behavioral health conditions like depression and PTSD due to the stress of their jobs. That’s significantly higher than the general public, according to one study by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.
Nationally, a study in the Journal of Safety Research found that first responders die by suicide at higher rates than those in other occupations.
But data about first responder suicides in Wyoming are few and far between. The organization First H.E.L.P. lists nine such deaths in the state in the years 2016 to 2023, though that may be an undercount.
At a registration table outside the ballroom, McDonald and Ryan Hieb, the current leader of ICAC, talked with Wyoming Public Radio about bringing their jobs home with them.
“You see all these terrible things during the day and you roll up in your driveway at the end of shift, and you're home to your family just like anybody else in the community,” said Hieb.
McDonald echoed that sentiment.
“You just see just horrendous child sexual assault,” he said. “You have to look at it, you have to watch it. You have to listen to it. If that doesn't affect you, there's probably something wrong with you.”
When he led ICAC, McDonald started a partnership between his unit and a mental health clinician, something he took advantage of himself.
“ I'd never told anybody anything about anything in my life,” he said. “So I took over. I was like, ‘Whew, I guess I gotta go talk to him, too.’ And I did. It was a really positive experience.”
While working for the fire marshal, McDonald said he watched how last year’s fire season, which Gov. Mark Gordon called “historic,” weighed down crews across the state. The relentless pace of the fires was exacerbated in some areas by not having enough volunteers and staff.
“Just how run thin some of those departments are,” he said. “I mean, they are going, going, going.”
Lisa Smelser works at the Gillette Police Department dispatch center. She stood outside the ballroom and talked about the effect her work has had on her.
“ I do have anxiety,” said Smelser. “That is something that over my career, that I have developed and have received assistance with, be it medication, meeting with clinicians and things like that. At this point, I am happy to say that I am no longer on medication for it.”
Her anxiety is tied, in part, to her work at the dispatch center, she said.
“You never know what's coming on the other end of that phone call,” she said. “You always are prepared for the worst case scenario. When that phone rings, then you start getting that anxiety, that anxiousness of what's it going to be, how bad it's going to be.”
Zachary Gonzales is a Casper police officer who goes by “Gonzo.” He helped organize the conference with the Wyoming Peace Officers Association.
Before he was a cop, he went through his own mental health struggles after a gym he started closed down during the pandemic.
“ Kind of like a midlife crisis, if you will,” said Gonzales. “Lost my whole purpose. I mean, it's what I dedicated my entire life to. For about a year and a half, I was on a struggle bus, dude. Totally lost, just absolutely in a dark hole.”
Gonzales’s mental health conference is only possible because of a First Responder and Law Enforcement Mental Health Support grant from the state Department of Health. Some at the conference said they hoped it would be the first of many more.
“Here in Wyoming, Montana, more of these rural areas, we do have resources,” he said. “It's not marketed like it is on the East Coast and the West Coast. Our hope with this, like I said, is this being the first one, we would attract people from surrounding states too to help create more of an awareness.”
Jack Fetter is a patrol sergeant for the Casper Police Department and a peer support coordinator for his coworkers. His peer support job involves coming out to help people like Gonzales when there’s an officer-involved shooting, as well as helping with daily mentoring.
He's noticed a disconnect between the dynamic, day in and day out work he and others are doing, versus the way people in the community view his job.
“ We respond to houses for calls for service, and we'll go inside this house and they'll have ‘Cops’ on TV,” said Fetter. “We'll be standing there and they're actually watching ‘Cops’ or ‘Live PD.’ I just find it fascinating.”
Fetter also sees more that could be done to fight mental health issues, particularly by the state of Wyoming.
“I think Wyoming, we're sort of a little bit behind the times, and it takes us a while to catch up,” he said. “I think more resources can be put towards it.”
Shaina Smith came to the conference from the other end of the spectrum. She’s a psychologist in Cheyenne who frequently works with police at Smith Psychological Services.
Working with first responders on their mental health requires a certain kind of cultural competency, she said.
“They can see through your bullshit really easily,” said Smith. “They're trained to read people, and so you really just gotta be genuine. You gotta have a good bullshit meter.”
Smith explained the way U.S. society is set up contributes to feelings of isolation in the first responders she helps.
“When you traumatize a few people and then they expect to carry that trauma alone, then we end up with a traumatized few and a naive rest of society that's very us versus them culture,” she said. “We are so afraid of vicarious trauma in Western society that if I touch you with my trauma, you're going to catch it. So what law enforcement and first responders do is try to protect the world around them by holding all of that trauma to themselves. ‘I chose this job, not you. I will deal with the seedy underbelly of Wyoming, while you live in a society.’”
But that dynamic could be so much better, she said.
“We as civilians have to be able to ask in a not weird way, our first responder brothers and sisters, like, ‘Hey, how are you actually? What is this job like?’” Smith said. “ And be willing to hear that without judgment, which is rare in society. And it's simple. It's talking. It's community. It's caring, it's love, it's compassion.”
In the meantime, there is one thing Chris McDonald said could go a long way in improving emergency workers’ mental health.
“More dogs. More comfort dogs.”
Based on his sniffing, a service dog named Axel Rose concurred.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, supporting state government coverage in the state. Wyoming Public Media and Jackson Hole Community Radio are partnering to cover state issues both on air and online.
