BOSTON — In early December, Janice McCarthy of Andover began wrapping Christmas presents in her home.
The gifts are not intended for her family members but children of law enforcement families who have lost their parents to suicide in recent years. She wants them, especially the mothers who are in many cases struggling financially, to know that they are not alone and people are thinking of them at this time of year.
McCarthy connected the families buying the gifts with the families of law enforcement she knows all over the country. Her home becomes the pool for those gifts. They are repackaged with holiday cards and provide the families with sponsors’ contact information so they can thank them.
McCarthy understands the pain of those families. Her husband, Capt. Paul McCarthy, a Massachusetts state trooper, killed himself in 2006 after a series of traumatic incidents he experienced on the job over 13 years.
Paul McCarthy was run over by a stolen MBTA bus and trapped inside his cruiser before help arrived. He loved his job and came back to work after more than a year of recovery.
“Unfortunately, a couple of years after that, he responded to a call in Worcester when there was a wrong-way drunk driver,” Janice McCarthy said. “He got out of his car and the driver came right on him and hit him and it was a huge trigger for his PTSD.”
Nor was that the last accident he was involved in. He was hit again in a tunnel in Boston, and lived in a constant state of fear for the rest of his life.
“He got into trouble at work and home. He didn’t sleep; he couldn’t go to family functions, didn’t like to be around people, didn’t like to do anything that we used to do, didn’t want to fly,” McCarthy said. “At the end of his life, his perception of his reality was very skewed.”
Paul McCarthy was 41 when he turned his gun to his chest and pulled the trigger on a construction site in Canton. The average age of U.S. police officers who take their own lives is 42, according to recent data by the Badge of Life, an organization that studies police post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide.
“They (law enforcement officers) get physical training, they get training on CPR and ballistics and all that,” McCarthy said. “But the thing that killed them the most is themselves. And there’s no training on that.”
More than a decade after her husband’s death, McCarthy testified at the Statehouse on a bill that might bring much-needed change to the entire culture of police departments.
Reps. James Lyons, R-Andover, and Timothy Whelan, R-Brewster, filed a bill earlier this year that will mandate mental wellness training for police officers.
The bill was initiated three years ago by Janice McCarthy who called Lyons, her representative in Andover. Her late husband was Whelan’s friend.
“We will give the platform to discuss mental health issue openly,” said Lyons whose father is a retired police officer. “We want to raise the level of awareness of how deep a problem this is, and to give them the help that they need in advance.”
The Statehouse News Service reported that during the November hearing, Karen Solomon, vice president and founder of law enforcement mental health awareness group BLUE H.E.L.P., testified that in 2016, five officers killed themselves in Massachusetts, compared to two who lost their lives in the line of duty.
“The number keeps changing, unfortunately. Now we have eight,” Solomon said in a recent interview.
Solomon’s organization tries to keep the number verified one by one. At the beginning of December, the number of police officers who committed suicide in the United States this year was 95. By the middle of December, it had risen to 101.
Very few families are willing to give her pictures. The organization’s website is filled with pictureless profiles.
“The culture issue in law enforcement is that we don’t discuss the problems, the trauma, and if you seek professional help to help you deal with that, historically, you’ve been viewed as being less tough. Weak,” Whelan said in his Statehouse office.
If the bill goes through in 2018, the municipal police training committee and the State Police Academy will have to establish mental wellness and suicide prevention training in recruit basic training curriculum, and in-service or recurrent training curriculum. Such training is not available now.
The mandated two-hour course will teach police healthy coping skills to manage the stress and trauma of policing, and how to recognize the symptoms of PTSD and the signs of suicidal behavior within themselves and other officers.
The course also has to be designed to reduce and eliminate the stigma associated with law enforcement officers reaching out for mental health services.
“We’re sick of our friends taking their own lives,” said Whelan, who had 26 years background in law enforcement as a corrections officer and state trooper. “We see more people willing to accept help, more people willing to understand the issues that their job forces them to face every day. And that’s very helpful, but we’re trying to further the discussion and move the ball a little further down the field with this bill.”
Somerville Police Capt. Michael Cabral is a supporter of a healthier mental health environment.
In the Statehouse hearing, Cabral spoke about his experience in 1991 witnessing his father, a sergeant in the Middlesex Sheriff’s Department, take his own life using a firearm on a baseball field where he had taught him to play baseball, the Statehouse News Service reported.
“My dad said, ‘Mike, go back, go back,’ and I said, ‘Dad, don’t do this please,’” Cabral told the committee. “He then put the gun to his head and took his life. So, I have had to live with that for 26 years of my life.”
Cabral spent 31 years in the Somerville Police Department and will retire in January. He received the police of the year award in 1991 for saving a family in a burning building and resolving an armed robbery without casualties.
Many times, the high-achiever police officer went back to his cruiser and replayed incidents that had happened in his job and felt very emotional.
“The Boston Police stress unit, I have found, is probably the best for police officers talking to police officers, but they are also certified social workers. They are very helpful,” Cabral said. “I’m not embarrassed to say that I have gone there and it has helped me tremendously.”
Not everyone is willing to speak as openly as Cabral, because in many cases that will leave them at risk of losing their job, as Paul McCarthy had to face when he was still alive.
“He realized he was in such pain, but the pressure from the hierarchy of the administration told him that if he went (to get treatment), they needed him to retire,” his widow said. “He didn’t go. And three months later he died.”
Sponsors hope the bill will create a breakthrough in that culture.
“We want to humanize the police officers and we want to make them also understand their own frailties,” Whelan said. “It’s OK to not be OK with some of the stuff that you see at work. And it’s OK to seek help. They need to seek help.”
Valdya Baraputri writes for the Gazette from Boston University Statehouse Program.