Improve police interactions in schizophrenia patients

Improved police mental health may help reduce the number of incidents involving police officers in people with severe mental illness, a new study by researchers at the Miami Academy of Arts and Sciences shows.

“About a quarter of police deaths involve a person with a serious mental illness like schizophrenia,” said Amy Weisman de Mamani, lead researcher and professor in the Department of Psychology. “So we really want to understand why these interactions went wrong.”

What caught Weisman de Mamani’s attention in existing research is that policemen are psychologically troubled as a group, partly because they are traumatized at work. She added: “Theoretically, when people are uncomfortable, they can’t regulate their emotions, especially in stressful moments. They are also more likely to replace them on others.”

Students who work with the psychology team, including Salman Ahmad, Denise Chung-Zou, Merranda McLaughlin, Genesis Saenz Escalante and Zachary Goodman, found that police officers who experienced psychological distress were more likely to contaminate those suffering from schizophrenia. This may affect their behavior.

“There is a strong connection in the direction we expect: the more painful emotions or suicidal thoughts or behaviors the officials feel, the more likely they are to stigmatize people with severe mental illness,” Weisman de Mamani said.

The team used a hybrid approach to analyzing survey and qualitative data from 107 officials. They only recruit male officers because most of the police are male, and almost all the violence between civilians and police involves male police. The survey includes scales that measure mental illness, depression, anxiety, stress, suicide behavior, and attitudes to social justice.

“It is interesting that when we look at attitudes to social justice, there is no social justice attitude that primarily affects the police’s stigma against schizophrenia,” Weisman de Mamani said. “However, we find that both psychological distress and suicidal thoughts regulate the link between social justice attitudes and stigma. Specifically, when police pain and suicidal thoughts are lower, social justice attitudes are associated with lower stigma with lower stigma, and therefore, when police pain and suicidal attitudes are associated with social attitudes, the attitude is not high. If the officers themselves are mentally uncomfortable, the idea of ​​social justice may not protect the officer from the stigma view of mentally ill people.”

These findings have important social implications, attract attention and require increased mental health support for police officers. The findings suggest that such support could help reduce police-induced deaths involving people with severe mental illness. Increased mental health support can also improve or even save the lives of officials, their depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and attempted suicide, and suicide deaths.

Working on this research project, strengthening Weisman de Mamani and his team, working as a police officer is an incredibly stressful job, and many police officers are worried that they will lose their job if they admit they are suffering from psychological distress.

Weisman de Mamani believes that “giving officers the resources they need, including rest time, can recover from traumatic events if they seek mental health assistance and ensure confidentiality and work security. If officials are unwilling to do their work with a clear mind, they need to suffer from a good component.

In the long run, Weisman de Mamani hopes to establish interventions tailored to police culture by participating in experts such as retired police and police chiefs.

Weisman de Mamani’s research has been published recently in the academic journal of the American Psychological Society. Her research received the Provost Research Award from the Office of the Vice Provost of Research and Scholarships and was passed the Flip Award from the Department of Psychology.