International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, Inc.
International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, Inc.
By: Troy Shuey
Everyone thought having a Peer Support Team would fix the trauma and make everything ok. It started small in 2012 where 5 personnel were sent to training and became ICISF Trained and ready to help. But then in 14 months, our department had 5 line-of-duty deaths. How could we expect 5 trained persons who were also affected by the trauma of such loss to do peer support without the support themselves?
As time moved forward other events occurred and it become apparent the Peer Support Team needed to grow. So, a peer support ICISF course of training was conducted in 2016, and 16 more peers were trained. However, there was no forward push or follow-through on utilizing the team. The team only responded to known critical events and did not address the long-term cumulative trauma of our department members.
Time marched on and as members of the team became more knowledgeable of what peer support could do and the benefits of being proactive it started to become accepted. Still, there were those of the old guard who still rub dirt in it and do not deal with it and impeded the growth of the program, but progress was being made.
Leadership changed and peer support become a bigger priority. The coordinator changed and training was conducted in 2021 to bring the team up to 36 members. These members included active members, support staff, and spouses. There were also many chaplains trained or re-retrained in the ICISF model. It was time to start being proactive on a bigger scale.
Starting slowly peers would make calls to personnel to just see how they were doing and to explain the peer support team. Peer Spouses started to do the same thing with the spouses and significant others of our department. This has made great progress. Individuals are no longer shocked when a peer calls to contact them. We are making calls on those incidents which we tend to think are normal, but we all know we handle the trauma differently. It is becoming a norm to expect a call or a debriefing and more are waiting for those to take place.
The biggest step we have currently taken is that we are now starting to have personnel call our peers to talk when they need to talk. They are not waiting. It is not everyone yet, but every step forward improves our program and changes the culture it is ok to talk about it and to get help if I need help.
Sgt. Troy E. Shuey
DPS Wellness Coordinator
Advanced Training Unit
CIRT Peer Support Coordinator
AST/DPS DRE Agency Coordinator
907-371-6912 (W-Cell)
907-354-1488 (P-Cell)
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