“I still hear the screams”: Lincolnshire top cop on PTSD and mental health in force

Lincolnshire Police’s Assistant Chief Constable Kerrin Wilson has said PTSD is a “big issue” within policing across the country, highlighting the need for increased mental health awareness across wider society – including for those who wear the emergency service uniform.

Kerrin Wilson is planning her retirement after four and a half years as the Assistant Chief Constable at Lincolnshire Police, the last of her roles in a 30-year career across the police force nationally.

Wilson says the force is in a “much better state” than it was when she first arrived in Lincolnshire in 2018, citing a “huge black cloud of austerity” that the police have now managed to move away from.

In an interview with The Lincolnite, she discussed the racist and sexist abuse she has been targeted with during her career, as well as reflecting on the roles and responsibilities of being one of the county’s most senior police officers. You can read part one in full here.

ACC Wilson also spoke about a fairly taboo subject within policing, in the form of PTSD and the mental health struggles officers can suffer with when attending serious incidents involving life or death situations.

Lincolnshire Police Assistant Chief Constable Kerrin Wilson.

“I still think of the very first really harrowing suicide that I attended, where somebody killed themselves with a shotgun, and their family found them”, she said.

“I can still hear the screams of that family in my ears now, and that was 27 years ago – so it never leaves you.”

The Assistant Chief Constable said that the horror of experiences like this serve as motivation for her to do the best job possible.

She added: “I think what it does is drive you to make sure you deliver the best service you can for those people, giving them either the justice of answers they that need to help them cope with the rest of their lives.

“At the end of the day it is them who have been through the terrible ordeal, we are just there to help pick up the pieces – it’s not our loss, it’s their loss.”

With a heightened underlining of the impact of mental health and wellbeing in recent times, the same push for awareness has been going on within the police force, which is particularity poignant given the severity of cases they have to deal with.

“We do have a much more recognisable focus on the mental wellbeing of our staff”, Kerrin said. “Some people might call in for these jobs day after day after day, and the emotional baggage you carry could potentially send you over the edge at some point.

“We need to be there to wrap around them and give them the support they need. PTSD is a big issue in policing up and down the country, and recognising those early signs of when you might be getting close to the edge is something we’ve been working on here in Lincolnshire.

“Ultimately, though, the people here care, and I think that’s the difference. Everybody knows that we’re not just here to do a job, we have to look after our staff as well, because if we don’t then we can’t be out looking after the public.”

The idea of remembering the human being behind the police uniform was also explored by ACC Wilson, who said the COVID-19 pandemic affected her and her force greatly as the police tried to navigate their way through a scary time for the world.

She said: “When the public are in a time of distress or angst and they call the police, they just expect somebody to turn up who hasn’t got any baggage going on. It’s important to remember that they might have their own stuff going on at home or anywhere in their lives.

“We were very conscious of that during the first COVID year. I was sending my officers out to areas where they might get COVID, and at that time we didn’t know how devastating it was going to be. I had to make that decision every single day and that weighed really heavily on me.

“I made over 200 personal phone calls to officers who caught COVID-19, I didn’t just leave it to line managers, I wanted them to know directly from me that I was there for them, but I think culturally society has got better at saying it’s okay to not be okay. I think policing has really embraced that too.”