Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology | Divorce in Cops and Corrections
by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP
I just spent the past week at the Society for Police and Criminal Psychology meeting. I had been the first executive director of the group and was the president the year before that, so I (with two others) totally ran 
the organization from October 2002 until this year where I passed the leadership role. This year I actually got to watch the presentations first hand since I wasn’t organizing a special meal or lost luggage or whatever “hissy fit” complaints come up at a conference. It is a great conference of law enforcement officers and psychologists. I suggest you schedule it next year.
I had also helped organize conferences at the FBI academy in the late 90’s to attack some of the myths of policing such as the high suicide rate and the high rate of domestic violence. Hell, when I started this job, one was led to believe that the world took their most screwed up group of people and gave them a uniform, badge, and gun, then stressed them out to the max and said “protect the public.” Problem was, I was seeing a lot of cops and they were pretty normal, in fact they were good friends, relatively smart and mostly family men. I mean, I came across some “players,” but most were doing overtime, complaining about their wives and husbands like the rest of us, and had decent relationship with their kids. Turns out from the FBI conferences, rates of domestic violence are not that high, in fact below the general population. And suicide rates are below the general population. We never got to finish the triad and look at divorces. We never had a definitive study of divorce. Until now! And the real data is not that bad! (more…)
ds and presentation do not seem very accurate anymore. In fact, statistics do not seem accurate anymore in general. You can’t trust them. It brings back the old quote from Mark Twain “There are three types of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”
and I felt real bad for him. She was only given a few weeks to live, then he said that was 4 ½ years ago. When she was diagnosed, he went down to Peru and purchased a bunch of cancer eating beetles, bringing them back into the United States in an ant farm type of arrangement. The beetles have to be swallowed whole and alive, but seem to release some kind of toxin that kills cancer cells. The beetles were used in many different ancient medicines. The toxin actually burns you while going down and in the stomach. He said at first week you eat 10 beetles a day, and it increases to 80 beetles a day before it comes back to rest at 10. He said he didn’t know if it worked because they changed her diet and a whole bunch of things she was doing, but he said whether it is real or a placebo effect it definitely worked for his mother. I looked it up on the internet, and in fact there is a lot about it, even some studies. Seems it is only the male beetle that releases a toxin, it does offer a legit treatment for skin cancer, but the mythology is that it works with all cancers, sometimes. Whoa, 80 burning beetles! Alive! And let’s say 40 are female, so you are eating 40 that you don’t even have to!
effective, and there are articles on both sides of the effectiveness issue. It has also been used in ancient medicines. But of course, it is illegal except in California, and you can’t cross state lines to bring it back to New York. So we devised some ways to get it back and try it if needed. Not approved by the government for treatment, yet it sure sounds more pleasant than burning beetles from South America. Unfortunately, you are supposed to take the oil in suppositories, so you might get a “high” in the wrong end. When in desperation, you look for anything to cure the problem, but underlying this is a lack of trust in our government to regulate these types of things. A lack of trust in medicine also. Why is it we don’t trust medicine and the government to regulate these things anymore? Shouldn’t we do something about this problem?