Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology | PTSD 3: Car Accidents
by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP
Of course, they’re driving around 24 hours a day, non-stop. The problem is there are other people on the road. The cops have lights on the car and fancy writing, but that just attracts people who have only partial attention to a mundane task like driving. Two cars hit, one of them is a cop car. 
From helping cop to a victim, from a person in charge to helpless man lying on the ground in pain or even unconscious. At an accident scene, we are worried about everything from keeping the traffic moving to making sure everyone gets the help that is needed. But the help the cop needs may not be as obvious as a broken bone, or some blood-stained clothes. And that becomes a major problem for policing.
A New York Times article in June of last year told a story about a physician that was analyzing a soldier’s brain that had been in Iraq and Afghanistan, and had died of a drug overdose. He was complaining of sleep problems, cognitive problems, memory loss, balance problems and suicidal depression. The physician notices a buildup of a certain type of protein and some dust-like scarring between the gray matter and the white matter of the brain. Many other soldiers’ brains seem to have the same scarring and complained of the same symptoms. The physicians felt it was from blast exposure, 
or all the loud sounds a soldier was exposed to. Up to 20 percent of soldiers seem to have these symptoms at different levels of severity. Problem was soldiers didn’t want to report it for fear they would be seen as going crazy. The article opines that in World War I, thousands of soldiers were shot for desertion or cowardice that may well of had a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). In the 2015 movie “Concussion,” Will Smith play Dr. Bennett Amalu who fights against the NFL when he discovers microtears in the brains cells of football players and the NFL won’t recognize it. Players complained of headaches, problems sleeping …(you know the rest). The NFL and the American Military recognize it as a disorder, when will our police departments become aware of it and recognize it? (more…)
Let’s start with two systems in your body — the Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) and the Parasympathetic Nervous System (PSNS). The sympathetic nervous system raises you up, pumps blood to your muscles, makes you heart rate go up, releases acid in your stomach to chew up the food, makes you breathe shallow and quick and all stuff so you can fight or flight. It throws your brain into the mode that causes tunnel vision, so it affect everything. Now you can’t just keep going up and up, so the parasympathetic nervous system calms you down. It releases the different hormones and stuff that calms all the body down so you can relax. They work in conjunction with each other to regulate your body and make it a mean fighting machine, or a run fast and get away from the Tyrannosaurs Rex running machine.
together as a team to stop crime. Not one of their powers is complete, but together they are unstoppable. In fact in each adventure, at least one of them is in jeopardy, but gets saved by the other. They are effective as a team and that is why we like them so much. 