Stress is a big part of the job in the fire and emergency medical services. Little research has been done, however, on predicting symptomatic distress in emergency workers. Two recent studies attempted to look at the personality traits exhibited by those with severe emotional responses and those who manage to cope better.
Photo by Keith D. Cullom Researchers studied emergency workers who responded to the Interstate 80 collapse.
More of the research focused on victims of disasters than on those involved in rescue or recovery operations. Emergency responders, however, usually have much higher levels of exposure to the experiences related to development of post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological problems than do the civilian victims.
Daniel Weiss and others from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, studied emergency workers involved in operations at the Interstate 880 collapse following the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. Their main focus was on how the presence of disassociative symptoms such as depersonalization (a feeling that a person is at another place "watching" the incident) during the response impacted on later coping behaviors.
Subjects were recruited from four categories: police, fire, EMS and California highway department personnel. Participants were taken from those who actually worked the I-880 site, those who lived and worked in the city on the day of the quake but were not assigned to duty at the collapse; and emergency workers from San Diego. These last two were essentially used as a control group.
All those involved were given tests to measure symptomatic response, adjustment and social support. All measures were completed in regard to a specific incident with those at the interstate using that as their focus. For the other groups, each worker selected some incident recalled as their most stressful.
The researchers noticed that greater exposure to the traumatic critical incident was associated with higher levels of symptomatic distress. In addition, lower levels of pre-trauma psychological adjustment were associated with higher levels of distress.
"Whatever the mechanism, it appears increasingly clear that disassociation during the traumatic event is an important risk factor for future problems after exposure to critical incidents," Weiss said.
The second paper focused on volunteer brushfire brigades in Austra-lia. Carmon Moran of the University of Sydney and Neil Britton, chief advisor to the Civil Defense Department in Wellington, New Zealand, looked at two emergency services organizations. Participants were given four standardized tests to measure demographic and work variables, personality and a stress symptom checklist. The common perception, especially among many emergency services workers, is that they are more psychologically prepared for stress than some others. This can be described as "hardiness."
"There is no evidence to support the idea that emergency service volunteers demonstrate more 'hardy' personality characteristics," Britton said. "Our subjects demonstrated a reasonably wide range of scores, which suggests there is no single 'hardy' type in this emergency group."
One significant predictor of stress reactions was length of service more years of front-line emergency work seems to be linked with a more severe reaction. Also, those with more experience and working in busier units were more likely to report a longer reaction to a traumatic incident. "It may be that the business of the volunteer unit may be the more important work-related variable here, as it is often combined with degree of exposure to trauma," Britton noted. "That is the higher frequency of call-outs increases the risk of exposure to disturbing events."
This may be especially significant since the study focused on volunteer departments in a rural setting. Paid workers usually experience a greater volume of calls and there is a potential for major differences in the nature and types of responses due to factors associated with rural vs. urban areas.
Personality variables do not appear to be predictive of who will get into trouble and who won't; length of service and unit call-out frequencies were much more important.
"Any association between length of service and reactions is interesting," Britton said, "because it suggests that time does not necessarily 'heal' the reactions generated from emergency work."
Kurt Ullman, a Firehouse® contributing editor, is a registered nurse and regional chairman of the volunteer Indiana Arson and Crime Association.
