Psychological health has become an increasingly important conversation within the fire services community.
We have seen the importance of moving beyond a reactive approach to psychological wellbeing and thinking more broadly about prevention, and how we support people throughout their careers.
This is underpinned by our Strategy to 2030, which sets out plans to double the number of people we support by 2030.
In a new article with The British Psychological Society – which you can read here – our Chief Executive, Sherine Wheeler, explores some of the recent developments and why she believes the growing focus on psychological health is so important.
In it, she writes: “The qualities that make firefighters effective in an emergency are not necessarily those that make it easy to seek psychological help. Operational readiness requires remaining calm, decisive and functional under extreme pressure – yet those same qualities can make vulnerability and help-seeking harder to recognise or disclose.
“Firefighters and control officers face repeated exposure to trauma, death, injury and suffering, creating a potentially cumulative psychological load, alongside occupational factors affecting sleep, stress, recovery, relationships and wellbeing. Meanwhile, unpredictable shifts require repeated transitions between routine activity, intense activation and recovery. And while the strong collective identity of watches and crews can be highly protective through trust, cohesion and belonging, these may also make difficulties harder to disclose if they are perceived as affecting the team.
“For many, being a firefighter is also a core identity and source of meaning, so psychological needs can feel like a threat to competence or belonging. These factors sit alongside wider pressures including organisational change, industrial pressures and public scrutiny. Consequently, traditional mental-health models may not always fit a population that values practicality, confidentiality, peer connection, autonomy and operational insight.
“Credible psychological care for this community therefore has to be designed around that distinctive occupational context.”
The article discusses:
- The context
- Why this matters now:
- Beyond individual resilience
- From incident response to whole-career psychological health
- From assumptions about culture to trust and engagement
- From treatment to prevention
- The opportunity to strengthen psychological care