'It's OK to ask for help': Event aims to improve mental health care for first responders

He did everything he was trained to do, and rescue crews were able to get the infant to a hospital, but the girl died. Funkhouser was then tasked with telling the parents the grim news.

As the parents approached the hospital and saw the officer accompanied by a priest, the mother fell to the ground sobbing. The priest went to comfort her and told Funkhouser he would handle it from there.

Funkhouser returned to the police station and finished his shift. But for weeks, the trauma continued to haunt him. He replayed the day over and over in his head, and the story became twisted, to the point where Funkhouser blamed himself for the child’s death.

“It tore me apart,” he said, “but I bottled it up.”

Before long, Funkhouser turned to alcohol to wash away the pain. It got to the point where he couldn’t sleep unless he passed out from drunkenness.

Eventually, it caught up with him, and an old police sergeant asked him what was wrong. Funkhouser told the story, but the sergeant offered little solace.

“He looked at me and said, ‘You need to toughen up, kid.’ He said if I didn’t step up, I was never going to survive on the job.”

But Funkhouser knew he needed help, though he was ashamed to ask for it. Instead, he made an appointment with a doctor three counties away and arrived at his office wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses, hoping no one would recognize him.

Funkhouser told the story to the doctor, and the response he got surprised him.

“He said this amazing phrase, which I was forever thankful for: ‘That’s totally normal, Dave. Let me tell you how you can get through this.’

“It was like someone had reached into my heart and pulled needles out of it … and the pain and pressure on my chest was lifted off.”

The doctor provided Funkhouser with tips and tools he could use when faced with traumatic situations in the future, and those tools helped Funkhouser numerous times throughout his law enforcement career.

And as he rose in rank and eventually became a police chief, Funkhouser vowed that his officers would never have to go through what he did. He became known as being “too sensitive,”

“But when guys were in trouble or needed help, I was the one they reached out to.

“We are told when we take the badge and we swear that oath, that we’re supposed to just accept all this. And I don’t think that’s right. I think it takes more courage … to come forward and say, ‘I need help.’ Then you can begin to recover from that injury and become an even better person than you were before.”

‘It’s OK to ask for help’

Funkhouser was the keynote speaker at Thursday’s “First Responder Resilience Event,” hosted by the Milwaukee VA Medical Center in conjunction with the War Memorial Center and the BRAVE Program at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

The event, which took place at the War Memorial, was aimed at first responders, their families and supporters, and it sought to drive home two points that arose during Funkhouser’s story:

• It’s OK not to be OK.
• Asking for help is a sign of strength, not of weakness.

Even today, when awareness of mental health is at an all-time high, too many first responders feel much like Funkhouser’s old police sergeant — that showing emotion is a sign of weakness. But trauma and its effects are unavoidable for first responders, Funkhouser said, so it’s better to learn how to deal with it than to bottle it up.

“There are hundreds of public servants … who are going to experience dramatic and awful things. And if we don't help them, who will?” he said. “We need for them to know that it’s OK to ask for help.”

He said first responders are trained to call for backup when a situation is starting to get out of control. It should be no different for their mental health.

“Why don't you call for backup for yourself, when you're dealing with trauma?” he said. “We need to take the cloak off the stigma that asking for help is a sign of weakness and instead lift them up in the light. We need to shine a light on the people who have the courage to do those things to get that help.”

He said funding wellness for first responders is just as important as buying police cars, fire trucks and ambulances.

“As much as any other tool and equipment, we need to move that needle from, ‘Well, I would really like a wellness program’ to, ‘We must have that, and it has to be at the same level of importance as all the other training and skill.’”

Funkhouser’s talk kicked off an afternoon of activities designed to help first responders. Dozens of organizations that provide support for first responders were on hand to pass on their resources and answer questions, while breakout sessions covered with self-care and learning how to cope with the “new normal” of being a first responder.

‘We’ve got to take better care of our people’

The event concluded with a short talk by Wauwatosa Police Chief James MacGillis, who emphasized the importance of taking care of the people whose job it is to take care of others during times of crisis.

“That's why we're here: to support that mission,” he said. “That means promotion, and support, of the wellness of our personnel. That means financial support. That means advocacy, messaging, actions, training, embracing the spiritual needs of our personnel and giving them permission to not be OK, and fostering an environment where it's OK to ask for help.”

MacGillis and others noted that more first responders die by suicide than by being killed on the job.

“We’ve got to take better care of our people and focus on their tactical, legal and emotional survival,” he said.

“By embracing wellness and resiliency and creating an organizational culture of support, you can truly help our first responders achieve normalcy,” he said. “We're not normal. We're really trying to achieve helping them to find a balance let him know that we have their six.

“Explore your processes, your systems, your organizational culture, and ensure it truly supports wellness and resiliency of your service members.”