An Examination of Stress, Mental Health Care Services, and Barriers to Accessing Mental Health Care Services among Police Officers

There is little doubt that policing is a stressful occupation. Officers must manage a variety of situations, under oftentimes less-than-ideal circumstances. While departments may provide Employee Assistance Programs or a Departmental Psychologist, there is often little support for officers to utilize these services. Certainly, the culture surrounding policing has often acted as an additional barrier for officers to seek out mental healthcare services. What is more, there is a dearth of research examining the experiences of Hispanic/Latinx police officers, as compared to their White or Black counterparts. The current project was conducted in collaboration with the Las Cruces Police Department as part of a larger series of projects. These data include self-report surveys completed by 109 officers of all ranks from within the police department in 2019. I utilized a modified version of Spielberger and colleagues (1981) Police Stress Survey, Cohen’s (1994) Perceived Stress Scale, and Reisig and Mesko’s (2009) procedural justice scale, in addition to questions regarding their personal methods of coping, knowledge of services, and willingness to access services. I examined three research questions. First, what do officers in this department identify as stressful? Second, how are the officers in this department currently coping with stress, including through both prosocial and maladaptive ways? Finally, what barriers do these officers identify to accessing mental healthcare services? Using a series of regression models, I found that officers generally ranked organizational sources of stress, such as political pressure within the department or inadequate salaries as more stressful than occupational sources of stress, such as writing traffic tickets or going to court. Additionally, while officers generally coped with stress in prosocial ways such as physical fitness or family activities, they did not access departmentally provided services. Importantly, however, these officers indicated a willingness to access specific types of services, such as educational classes or check-ups. Finally, officers predominately identified resource-related barriers, such as knowledge about services, to accessing mental healthcare services. These findings suggest that the culture within policing may be shifting to one that is less stigmatizing towards mental health services and welcome increased knowledge disbursement about such services.