North Yorkshire police officer Sergeant Ed Simpson speaks about his experience of mental trauma in a bid to encourage emergency workers to take care of their mental health

SERGEANT Ed Simpson’s duties as a Family Liaison Officer often involved him guiding people through traumatic events – something in his seven years in the role he had always taken in his stride.

But out of nowhere, one “routine” case proved devastating. He had to take the parents of a teenager killed in a car accident to Northallerton mortuary to view the body. But his own reaction to the mother’s grief took him completely by surprise.

“She let out a scream which sounded like nothing I had ever heard before," he says. "It just devastated me and left me feeling so helpless.

“She was desperately trying to wake him up, telling him to open his eyes, asking him why he was so cold and what he had done to himself.

“It had a massive effect on me; something I wasn’t expecting. I had always been able to get on with my job; show compassion but get on with the job. But after that I wasn’t the same.

“Any kind of emotion would get to me; in our job we’re dealing with death and some very pressurised situations.

“I put it down to becoming a dad – my daughter had been born seven months earlier. I thought I would have to learn how to be a dad and a cop and work out how to do both.”

But it wasn’t to prove so simple. He continued on for four years with his condition slowly getting worse as he struggled to carry on in his role as a custody sergeant for North Yorkshire Police. He became increasingly withdrawn from family and friends, trying to get through 12-hour shifts by looking at the clock so that he could just get through the next 15 minutes. At his lowest point he would drive to work considering how he might die.

Eventually his wife and a friend intervened.

“It came out the blue," he says. "They were both crying and saying 'you need to get some help'. It was a complete shock, it was like them saying to me, 'you’ve lost an arm'."

He was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which had turned into severe depression.

Rather than taking time off sick, Sgt Simpson returned to work. Within days, his mental health deteriorated further.

“It was like I had been a boiling kettle for nine months and suddenly that kettle was switched off," he says. "Any noise at all was amplified. It was like white noise; I couldn't hear people. I was breaking down; I became nothing, absolutely nothing.

“I felt like I didn’t care about anything or anyone.”

The turning point came when a line manager took him aside. "He just said, 'Ed, are you alright, you look absolutely awful?' Then I accepted it and said, 'no, I’m not alright'. That was the first time I had gone off sick.”

After a year of receiving help from the mental health charity Mind, and medication from his GP, he returned to work, overseeing volunteering within North Yorkshire Police. He is also now an ambassador for Mind’s Blue Light Campaign, raising awareness of mental health issues within the emergency services.

According to the charity's research, one in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem, but people within the emergency services are at even more risk – and less likely to get support.

North Yorkshire Police recently pledged to tackle mental health stigma by signing the Blue Light Time to Change pledge, committing to an action plan to offer support and wellbeing advice to their workforce.

“People with depression aren’t sat in a corner clutching their head; I was sat at a custody desk checking people in and out of custody suites,” explains Sgt Simpson. “When I first joined the police, apart from all the training you receive around the law before you step out on the street, you’re trained in defence and handcuffs and your protective equipment.

"But nothing was told to cops about how to protect their mental wellbeing – but there’s equal risk in both.”

He now speaks to police forces up and down the country on how to protect their mental health in the job.

“I sit down as a sergeant and openly tell them about my experiences of developing depression and told them from the start we have to be mindful of the risk to your mental health,” he says. “You will be shocked at how many people in the services have had experience of mental illness. It’s important they know they’re not the only person and it’s not a sign of weakness.”

For more information on Mind’s Blue Light Programme, visit mind.org.uk/news-campaigns/campaigns/bluelight/