Thin Blue Mind / Smokey Heroes
Police Psychology | Holidays in Law Enforcement
by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP
Posts Tagged ‘police stress’
Police Psychology | Eating Bugs
Posted: November 17, 2016 in Public Information BureauTags: culture, police psychology, police stress
Police Psychology | Eating Bugs
by Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP
Water Beetles! Yummm…. I watched as people walked up to a street vendor and gathered a fried bug on a stick when I was in Hong Kong. I had been working with the Singapore Police Department and decided to 
make a little stop in Hong Kong on the way home. I figured, this is the culture, I should try a bug. So, I summoned up the courage and bought one. Took the shell off as I was instructed and bit into it. It was crunchy on the outside, but boy the inside was where the treat was. It tasted like the inside of a large bug, sort of like a shrimp paste gone really bad. It was much worse than the tequila worm from college, but then I had drank a significant amount of the bottle and couldn’t feel anything. Here it was just me and the bug. No Tequila, no revelry, no people encouraging you with their “yechs” and “oh my god he’s eating the worm.”
Later that evening we went to a sort of “Denny’s” and had Hong Kong food which was rather good in an eastern kind of way. I was comfortable with the food. At the table next to me was a group of cute college girls out on the town and they ordered a plate of barbecue pigeon heads, about 50 of these little heads looking up at you while you ate their beaks and eyes. I stared at them so long, they asked if I wanted to try them. I did, and they weren’t that bad, but man the culture was really different. When I went to China on a later trip to work again, there was a whole market with different kinds of bugs, silkworms, centipedes, deep fried scorpions, sautéed tarantulas. Some say they only eat bugs for either medicinal purpose or to freak out foreigners. Freaked Out! Worked for me. There are other places where we see culture first hand, although not through bugs. Like in our police officers. (more…)
Police Psychology: Intrinsic Heart Rate – A Landmark for the Ability to Engage in Rational Thought
Posted: November 3, 2016 in Police StressTags: heart rate, police psychology, police stress
Police Psychology: Intrinsic Heart Rate – A Landmark for the Ability to Engage in Rational Thought
by Doug Gentz, Ph.D. – Psychological Services
Your intrinsic (inherent) heart rate is how fast your heart would beat when you are calm and at rest if it wasn’t slowed down to your (observed) resting rate by your vagus nerve. Your resting heart rate is best measured when you’re comfortably laying down and relaxed. The “normal” resting rate for a healthy, young adult ranges from about 60 to 85 beats per minute (bpm), slightly higher on average for females than males. Individuals with well conditioned cardiovascular systems may have lower resting rates, often less than 60 bpm.
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.
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Police Psychology: Be the Solution, Not the Cause
Posted: November 1, 2016 in Rank and LeadershipTags: leadership, police pscyhology, police stress
Police Psychology: Be the Solution, Not the Cause
by Lt. Jason Childers, Texas
We frequently hear about how stressful police work is, and the sacrifices we make in the service of our community is an oft-repeated narrative in police circles. The jerks we deal with on the street, the trauma of violent incidents, rotating shifts, the state of hypervigilance, concerns of personal safety and missed family time are all considered as sources of stress inherent to the job. These shared difficulties help to draw us together as a law enforcement family, but one factor consistently overlooked is that we are one of the main sources of our own problems. The cop staring back at you in the mirror may have more to do with causing job related stress than anything dealt with on the street. The good news is, the cop staring back at you in the mirror can also be part of the solution, especially if you’re a supervisor.
How was life when you entered the academy compared to how things are going today? With stringent entry-level standards in policing, most police officers begin their careers in excellent physical and mental health. Along the way, many officers develop signs and symptoms of stress which include poor job performance, sleep disturbances, marital discord, domestic violence, PTSD, depression, alcohol and drug abuse, and even suicide. You’ve likely been through some of this yourself, or you’ve seen others deal with it.
But where does all of this come from?
Police Psychology | Becoming a Psychological Investigator When No One Asked Me To
Posted: October 24, 2016 in StoriesTags: investigations, police psychology, police stress, psychological investigator
Police Psychology | Becoming a Psychological Investigator When No One Asked Me To
by Marla Friedman Psy.D.,
I just finished watching Detective Gary Traver’s video, The Joy of a Missing Person Case. I know exactly what he means. I am a police psychologist
who has a full-time therapy practice, trains chiefs of police, FTO’s and rank and file officers as well as publishes articles nationally on mental health and suicide prevention. I love all that I do with law enforcement.
However, my secret wish, when I heard there was such a job, was to become an FBI profiler. Too bad, so sad. I was too old, and I don’t run fast or jump high. So I decided to create my training program to learn how to investigate crimes. How happy was I to find that some of the top investigators from the FBI, NYPD and other departments and associations were teaching during their off time or their retirement. At the time I didn’t realize that some of these people were the developers of profiling at the FBI behavioral unit. I learned so much from Robert Ressler and Roy Hazelwood. I took the basic and advanced courses in “the Reid Method.” I learned how to detect deception from Avinom Sapir, and did a 24-hour training with Vernon Geberth forcing myself to look at all kinds of nasty pictures until I could read his book and eat my lunch at the same time (not easy and a wonderful weight loss method.) I did ride a-longs, field interviews, went to jail to talk to bad guys, watched interviews through the two-way mirror, wrote up psychological analysis on cold cases; you name it I did it. I attended everything I could, even when told, “no psychologists allowed!” I found a way to talk myself in. So, my adventure began! (more…)
