The Silence That Comes With the Job

The Silence That Comes With the Job

Why the closeness that protects firefighters can make it hard to speak — and what cumulative strain does when it has no name.

Firefighters are known for standing by one another. Zegel and her colleagues, writing on first-responder trauma, describe why: a culture built on teamwork and camaraderie, on heroism, toughness, and self-reliance. Roughly eight percent of career and volunteer firefighters are women (Evarts & Stein, 2020), and theirs is a culture that prizes rationality, hardiness, and focus alongside that closeness. That closeness saves lives. It is also, at times, what keeps a struggling firefighter quiet.

The barrier is not hard to name. Many firefighters worry that admitting to emotional trouble will mark them as unfit for duty — embarrassment, fear of being judged, and the practical worry that duties or pay could change. The culture's shorthand is familiar: don't complain, toughen up, rub some dirt on it. Zegel's team also notes that firefighters tend toward lower emotional expressiveness and are less inclined to call their frequent exposures "traumatic" at all. A strength relied on at work becomes a silence kept everywhere else.

The exposures themselves accumulate. Firefighters are estimated to have experienced between eight and thirteen types of potentially traumatic events (Langtry et al., 2021; Paulus et al., 2018) — not one terrible call, but an ongoing series. That matters: Watkins and colleagues note that cognitive processing therapy may be especially suitable for firefighters precisely because so many cannot name a single index event (Asmundson et al., 2019). When there is no one incident to point to, the injury is harder to describe and easier to dismiss — including by the person carrying it.

The schedule works against recovery. Feldman and colleagues (2021) name demanding shift work and chronic sleep disturbance as risk factors, and link shift work to greater stress and poorer emotion management, which in turn strains relationships with spouses and partners. Tiredness of that order is not a private matter; it follows a person home.

One figure is counterintuitive. In a large Canadian survey, firefighters averaged about ten types of potentially traumatic events, and 13.5 percent reported symptoms consistent with current post-traumatic stress — the lowest rate of any group sampled, with police, correctional workers, paramedics, and dispatchers all significantly higher (Carleton et al., 2018). That may reflect resilience. It may also reflect a culture in which admitting the symptoms is the hardest step of all. A systematic review put firefighter PTSD prevalence anywhere from 4 to 54 percent (Wagner et al., 2021). A 2015 survey of career and volunteer firefighters found nearly half reporting suicidal thoughts, about one in five a suicide plan, and about one in six a suicide attempt — far above general population estimates (Stanley et al., 2015). Around half report excessive alcohol use (Haddock et al., 2015).

None of this means the closeness is the problem. It is, in fact, the protection. The clinical literature follows from that: care that is culturally competent, that frames trauma responses like hypervigilance and emotional numbing as adaptive in the line of duty — and, notably, peer-led meetings and workshops, which Bowers and colleagues (2019) found show promise for improving help-seeking. Firefighters listen to firefighters.

If the quiet way of carrying this is no longer working, that is a reasonable time to talk with someone — ideally someone who understands the culture you come from. You do not have to wait until it becomes an emergency.

Sources: Zegel, M., Leonard, S. J., Healy, N. A., & Vujanovic, A. A. (2023). Trauma and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Among First Responders. In M. L. Bourke, V. B. Van Hasselt, & S. J. Buser (Eds.), First Responder Mental Health: A Clinician's Guide. Springer. Figures cited from the studies referenced within that chapter: Langtry et al. (2021); Paulus et al. (2018); Watkins et al. (2018); Asmundson et al. (2019); Feldman et al. (2021); Carleton et al. (2018); Wagner et al. (2021); Stanley et al. (2015); Haddock et al. (2015); Carey et al. (2011); Bowers et al. (2019); Evarts & Stein (2020).