As part of a series of reports on the mental health of police officers, The newspaper spoke with dozens of experts and agents in addition to reviewing several dozen documents, including around forty requests for access to information. An observation emerges: it has never been so difficult to be a police officer.
Quebec’s two largest police forces demonstrate creativity and innovation to support police officers, whether by deploying psychologists directly to crime scenes or by offering meditation, arts and wellness classes. awareness.
Laurence Demers Rivard and Louis-Francis Fortin are the two guardian angels of psychological health, respectively within the Sûreté du Québec (SQ) and the Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM).
They are both responsible for a team of psychologists specially trained to deal with police reality.
Visibly motivated and passionate about her mandate, Laurence Demers Rivard tries to think outside the box in order to reach as many police officers as possible. His team puts together a multitude of training courses, often tailor-made at the request of managers, to help SQ police officers.
Mandatory consultations
She has now made it mandatory to consult a psychologist every year for all provincial police patrol officers – a more aggressive approach, certainly, but necessary according to her. Given the difficulty of finding psychologists, she is still a long way from reaching the goal, but she is not losing hope.
Psychologist Louis-Francis Fortin and his team benefit from the undeniable support of their organization in order to prevent mental health problems at the SPVM, while there has never been a single cut in his team since its creation in 1998.
“Yes, police officers are more at risk of developing psychological disorders, but we are there for them (…), said Mr. Fortin. We have several tools to share and we feel a great openness.”
The two professionals agree that mentalities have evolved a lot since they took office, although there is still a lot to do. The two police forces are always trying to innovate in order to stay up to date in their service offering: the SPVM has just launched a pilot project in which it offers arts courses to police officers, while the Sûreté du Québec teaches techniques of self-compassion to help police officers manage their emotions on their own after a difficult intervention. They are then taught unorthodox techniques like meditation and mindfulness.
Straight into the action
Psychologists from the SQ and SPVM also do field work. They travel during events with high traumatic potential, as was the case for the murder of officer Maureen Breau, in Louiseville, in the winter of 2023.
“We stayed there for two weeks,” says Mme Demers Rivard. Each police officer at the station had a designated speaker. We subsequently returned to all the significant moments.”
SPVM psychologists are also called upon to attend certain more difficult scenes, particularly when children are involved.
For both police forces, requests for help have increased over the past five years.
