Joel Fay, Ph.D. - Guest
Joel Fay, Ph.D. is a retired police officer who proudly served the force for over 30 years and made a career change, obtaining his Doctorate in Psychology. He now has his own private practice, is the lead clinician for West Coast Post-Trauma Retreat (WCPR), and is the co-founder of the First Responder Support Network, where he is currently the Clinical Director. He also teaches Crisis Intervention Training across California, is the co-author of Counseling Cops, and the author of many articles about emergency service stress. In his private practice, he specializes in working with emergency responders from many different organizations. Dr. Fay has received many awards for his amazing work, including the California Psychological Association 2007 Humanitarian Award and the American Psychological Association 2012 award for Outstanding Contributions to the Practice of Policy and Public Safety Psychology. |
W. Keith Sutton, Psy.D. - Host
Dr. Sutton has always had an interest in learning from multiple theoretical perspectives, and keeping up to date on innovations and integrations. He is interested in the development of ideas, and using research to show effectiveness in treatment and refine treatments. In 2009 he started the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy, providing a one-way mirror training in family therapy with James Keim, LCSW. Next, he added a trainer and one-way mirror training in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and an additional trainer and mirror in Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy. The participants enjoyed analyzing cases, keeping each other up to date on research, and discussing what they were learning. This focus on integrating and evolving their approaches to helping children, adolescents, families, couples, and individuals lead to the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy's training program for therapists, and its group practice of like-minded clinicians who were dedicated to learning, innovating, and advancing the field of psychotherapy. Our podcast, Therapy on the Cutting Edge, is an extension of this wish to learn, integrate, stay up to date, and share this passion for the advancement of the field with other practitioners. |
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (00:22)
Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today, I'll be speaking with Joel Fay Ph.D., who is a clinical psychologist and served for over 30 years on the police force before becoming a psychologist, at Dolson Private Practice, and is the lead clinician for the West Coast Post-Trauma Retreat. He's also the co-founder and clinical director of the First Responders Support Network, will teach his crisis intervention training to police officers across California, has published many articles about emergency service stress, and is the co-author of Counseling Cops. Joel has received many awards for his amazing work, including the California Psychological Association 2007 Humanitarian Award and the American Psychological Association 2012 award for outstanding contributions to the practice of policy and public safety psychology. Let's listen to the interview.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (00:22)
Well, hi, welcome Joel.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (01:29)
Oh, thank you. Good afternoon.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (01:31)
Thanks for joining today. So Joel, you and I know each other from the Marin County Psych Association, even back before I was licensed, when I was back in grad school. I wanted to bring you on the show today and hear a little bit about what you've been doing lately. I know that you were a police officer and then you became a psychologist. You also have been involved in the West Coast Trauma Retreat program for first responders. I would love to hear a bit more about how you got to the work you're doing, and also get some thoughts on what's been going on. There's been a lot of focus on police, especially in the last year, over a year now.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (02:19)
Yeah. It's been a rough year for law enforcement in a lot of ways, but you're right, that's my background. I was a police officer for over three decades. I became a psychologist while a police officer and then got involved in working with the homeless and the mentally ill. And that was my role for about 11 years. And then I retired about 10 years ago and have been in private practice, but I do a lot of teaching, some consulting with the agencies, and then I see clients in between whatever else I'm doing. What I like about it is that I don't do the same thing every day and it gives me a lot of different challenges to deal with. And that makes life interesting.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (03:08)
Oh, great. Yeah. Tell me that story. How did you decide to become a psychologist and progress in that work from being a police officer?
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (03:19)
Well, there were a number of different factors that led to it, but at times it was a feeling that when I was talking to people, particularly younger people, that I wish their arrest was a significant moment in their life, obviously, and some of them had been arrested many times. But every time you go to jail, it's an opportunity for an intervention. And so I would want to talk to them and come up with something that I could say to them. I was a little naïve when I started grad school. I thought I would learn some magical things to say. I don't mean necessarily magical, but that I'd be able to say something and people go, “Oh, no kidding. This whole life I'm living is just not working.”
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (04:03)
And so, I soon lost that idea, but it was a chance to develop some skills to help me communicate better with people. And then it turned out to be something I really enjoyed doing. And I didn't think I would combine police work with psychology, but the whole crisis intervention thing hit the Bay Area around the mid-nineties. And that was something where I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And I've been teaching crisis intervention for over 20 years. So I still get to make an impact and hopefully make a difference throughout California, because I teach in many, many different places throughout the state.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (04:47)
Okay, great. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about crisis intervention. I actually don't know about the history of that or how that got going.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (04:53)
Well, it started in the eighties in Memphis, Tennessee. A guy named Sam Cochran was the police officer. As a direct result of one individual who was shot and killed by the police, everybody -- police and the community -- everybody kind of felt that there just wasn't enough training for law enforcement on how to deal with people in crisis. So Sam Cochran and others created this four-day crisis intervention training, and that was sort of the generic model. Some agencies do two. Where I live and teach in Marin, we do four, and some agencies do five, but people make it work for their community. And it's the idea of giving police officers who deal with mental health calls and crisis calls constantly, it gives them an opportunity to have some skills that they otherwise wouldn't have learned.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (05:57)
And this knowledge is for a lot of people. Even when you sit down to say, “What is schizophrenia?”, there are still a lot of folks in the world that think that schizophrenia means you have multiple personalities. There was even that movie with Jim Carey or whatever. And so just to understand what a mental illness is like, particularly when we talk about the genetic components of mental illness, it helps to create empathy, because I think a lot of people feel that with mental illness it's because you use drugs or something like that. Or you grew up in a bad family. And so we get to explain what actually happens and why people get mentally ill and how much we don't know about why people become mentally ill. And we bring in people with mental illness to talk to the class and their families can come in. And so we do all these different things and then include lots of training on de-escalation and what is the current case law that's out there. And we talk about that. So there's a lot that we try to cover in that short period.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (07:04)
Sure. That sounds great. I mean, it sounds like you're reframing mental illness and particularly at least schizophrenia and understanding that it's something that's more biological and not just only drug-induced and so on and so forth. Helping them have a different perspective. This is somebody who is really struggling and needs help rather than somebody choosing to not get well or something to that effect.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (07:29)
Right. And the challenge of course for the officers is that they often see these folks that are out on the street who are using meth. And for so many people, so many of these folks, the meth use is either on top of schizophrenia or mental illness or it's separate. Either way, it looks the same. So they're overwhelmed with the number of people they're dealing with. It doesn't help that the mental health system is completely overwhelmed and underfunded and the laws that we have in place now were written back in 1967. And they haven't been updated since then. A slight update happened about 15, maybe 20 years ago, but that's about it. And so people go into the hospital and they get released from the hospital. The officers keep dealing with them over and over again, and eventually, they commit a crime and they take them to jail. And so they're very frustrated about why the mental health system isn't doing its job.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (08:29)
It ends up being just kind of a revolving door.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (08:32)
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (08:36)
Okay, well, that's great. So you're kind of really continuing in that work in the crisis intervention and education.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (08:43)
Right. And the officers are very receptive to it. Because it helps them tremendously.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (08:52)
Yeah. And can you talk a little bit about the West Coast Trauma Retreat and the trauma work that you do?
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (08:59)
Sure. So WCPR, which is the acronym for West Coast Post-trauma Retreat started back in 1999. It was a group of us that got together and our goal was to help prevent first responder suicides. And I don't know if your listeners know this, but the problem of suicide in the first responder world is a significant, enormous problem. Like last year, more officers died of COVID than anything else. It was like 200 around 250 officers around the country we know, died of COVID. Then the second greatest number was suicide. And if you add up all the other causes of death, like officers can die in a car crash or they can get shot by a suspect, or they could have cancer that's considered work-related and they die as a result of that cancer. You add up everything else and it doesn't equal how many officers died by suicide.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (10:07)
So yeah. And of course, COVID was beyond that. So, the purpose of the retreat was to provide a place where, well, we train, but we seek out and look for culturally competent clinicians and clinicians that understand public safety, police, fire, and EMS dispatchers. And that want to work with this population. And unfortunately, a lot of clinicians don't want to work with law enforcement. They see law enforcement in a certain way. And they don't have a great deal of empathy for them. And so when we finally convince an officer to use their EAP or their insurance, and they go and talk to a therapist and the therapist says things that are like, unbelievable. Some of the stories that I've heard, the officers go like, “Well, therapy's a bunch of BS.”
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (11:06)
And they just don't bother going back again. And now we've lost that officer who does need therapy. We've lost that officer and it's very hard to convince them to go back. So, what the retreat is, it's really when they're hurting, when they're hurting significantly. Most of the folks that come through there, almost everybody has a pretty decent posttraumatic stress diagnosis. Lots dealing with depression. Of course, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of suicidal ideations. Many of them have suicide attempts. Substance abuse is often a part of life, because alcohol, it's accepted within the public safety culture. You know, they don't smoke a lot of marijuana or anything like that, but they'll drink. And so that ends up becoming a coping strategy and then that ends up becoming a disaster.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (12:04)
And our goal is to give them a chance. We like to say that we're a get back to life program as compared to a get back to work program. So some of the people that come to our program are working and are able to go back to work and continue working. And some that come to our program aren't working, they've been taken off of work. And some are able to go back and some make the decision, or are simply unable to go back to work. They can't get recovered enough to pass an evaluation to return to work.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (12:36)
Are there many too that actually don't even want to go back to work? I actually very early on, I worked with somebody who was in training and they were shot and did some trauma work around it, but they were kind of like, you know what? They decided, this is not the direction for their life.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (12:52)
Yeah, absolutely. Some of them make that decision of, I just don't need this anymore in my life. You know, it's not what I wanted. Of course, once you get shot, how do you go back out on the streets again. We call it the myth of invulnerability.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (13:16)
And so in the academy, you get all this training and you learn how to shoot your gun, and you're wearing a ballistic vest, and you have all this cool equipment. And so there's this myth that you inherit that's like, as long as you do everything we tell you to do, you'll stay safe. But then something, you go on a call and maybe you get shot, or maybe someone just points a gun at your face or something else like that. And then you realize, Wow, I almost died. There was nothing I could have done at that moment just to not die. I just didn't die. Like they didn't pull the trigger, the bullet missed, or whatever it was. So now that myth of invulnerability is shattered.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (14:00)
And then it's, well, how do you go back to work once it's shattered? And some people do, and they learn to live with that understanding. But for some folks, it's just a bridge too far, they can't do it. But I also think that the bigger problem is getting people to get help when they need it – the stigma against getting help or being perceived as weak. And, you know, you and I are from the Bay Area and everybody's got a therapist – or so it seems, you know – or you can go to a cocktail party and say, you know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and nobody bats an eye. But there are lots of places in this country where you can't do that. And so getting people from those parts also to get help is very difficult. And so, the bigger challenge is encouraging responders to take care of themselves and to get help before it becomes overwhelming.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (15:02)
One form of trauma that we're talking about is the trauma of potentially somebody shooting at you or getting hurt or something like that. But I mean, there's also the trauma of seeing others that have been hurt. And also about, I don't know what it's termed. I was talking to somebody in relationship to veterans, but a moral injury when someone you know hurt someone else, and has regret for having hurt or taken a life or whatever it may be.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (15:37)
Yeah. Moral injury is something I'm talking about a lot more with first responders. In the way I look, a moral injury involves guilt and shame, whereas trauma typically involves fear. And so that guilt and shame, responders often have this idea that they want to make a difference. And then when they show up and they can't – they're doing CPR on that infant, but the infant doesn't survive, or they don't save the kid that fell into the pool. Or they go on a call and here's this three-year-old, that's been horribly, sexually abused. They walk away from those things with vicarious trauma, but they also walk away from that with the sense of, my whole purpose is to make a difference, and yet, in this case, I couldn't make a difference.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (16:33)
And so one of the things that responders do is, as weird as this sounds, they blame themselves. And after having seen this so many times, I have my own little theory on this. And what I think is that if you blame yourself, that's something you have control over. So, you know, if you were a firefighter, Keith, and if only you had gotten here a little bit faster, you probably could have saved that child. Or, you know, if when the call came out, you weren't in a bathroom or something, or you weren't taking a shower or something. And so you look for the reasons why that horrible tragedy that occurred was somehow your fault. And in doing so, it gives you more control.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (17:27)
We can prevent these tragedies from happening in the future. You just have to make sure you don't screw up. And then we can make sure they don't happen. And often when you talk to them, they will argue with you. When you see people that are absorbing this guilt of responsibility, they will argue with you about why you're wrong. And even like, if I only had been working that day, that wouldn't have happened. And you know, well, what's the option? Like, are you going to work every day, 365 days a year for the rest of your career? And then what about the other shifts? Because you do have to sleep so it's, you know, they really work out a way of figuring out why they were at fault. And that's another part that we have to challenge and all that's around that moral injury.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (18:21)
Definitely with that shame, particularly also with victims of trauma, is very common in clients that I work with too. And even if the person was like abused as a child or so on, oftentimes this shame of if I had done something different or if it had stopped, so on. Because you're saying that, if that's not true, then life is even more unpredictable and anything can happen, and that's even more terrifying, because ultimately anxiety wants certainty. And if there is no rhyme or reason and there was nothing that could be done, that's oftentimes even more terrifying. So it ends up getting turned inward, which ends up being very painful in an attempt to cope.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (19:14)
Absolutely. You know, if you've talked to a five-year-old, then they'll tell you that the reason that daddy or mommy beat them was because they didn't eat their dinner. And all they have to do is eat their dinner and they don't get beaten. Of course, they don't understand, well actually daddy and mommy are alcoholics and have violent rages and it has nothing to do with your dinner. But you need to believe it had to do with something, because if it just could happen at any time, for any reason, that's just too overwhelming. And that's sort of the same thing in a, sort of a more sophisticated way. It's the same thing that responders do.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (19:52)
Well, so let's even extend this. If we could talk about what's happened with George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and you know, just a number of minorities that have been murdered in the line. But I think there's this trauma that people of color experience because of that sense that there may be no rhyme or reason of how one ends up dying at the hands of police or so on. And people have been aware of this, but to a much, much greater societal level in the last year.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (20:44)
I'd be interested in your thoughts on what's going on and your thoughts on police. I was trying to talk with a family member about the aspects of the police that were bystanders, or I wouldn't even say bystanders, were involved while George Floyd died. You know, the aspects of how the police system sets limits on each other or intervenes with each other or so on and the rules around being quiet and not saying anything. It's just, there's so much there.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (21:26)
I think that's a good question. First, almost every officer I know looks at the George Floyd thing and is disgusted by what they saw. In de-escalation, everybody understands sometimes, but not everything is de-escalate. Not every person could be de-escalated. And sometimes the only thing you can do is use force, but let's just say, you know, once you get that person on the ground and you get them in handcuffs, then you move them to what is called the position of recovery. Everybody gets it and, and kneeling on somebody for whatever it was nine minutes and something it's just insane. I mean, nobody can even understand why you would do that. But connected to that when I think of the officers that were there, I think there were three officers that are still facing charges, three or four. I'm not sure, but I think that two of them had literally days on the job.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (22:31)
Literally like two or three days on the job. And one of them actually said, you think we should move him and was shot down. You know, about that suggestion, there are laws out there that deal with the duty to intervene. But the challenge specifically for that situation, was, given the culture, there isn't that a two-day officer that is going to go up to his training officer or an officer with 20 years on and shove him off of somebody, and maybe there has to be something like that. But if that had happened, if one of those officers had said, we're just knocking this guy off of Floyd. And they do that. Then clearly Floyd wouldn't have died and those officers would've been fired.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (23:26)
Because of doing what they did, knocking off a senior officer. And then none of this would've made the media, there wouldn't have been any video to be shown and of course a man's life would've been saved. So I'm not minimizing that, but there has to be something in the culture, the public safety culture that allows that to occur. But, I would ask anybody that listens to this, I know this is primarily for therapists, but you know, like what would you have done in your second day in graduate school? You know, when you're watching a therapist or what would a surgeon do if they're sitting in? A doctor on their second day of medical school is observing a doctor, would they have the courage to go say, I think you're doing that surgery wrong, and push the doctor away from the surgery table.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (24:18)
I think it's, some intervention should have occurred. It's sad that it didn't, it's a tragedy. And ultimately I think it's a crime and officers around the country will learn from that. And I think that we'll make a difference. I also just want to say that for the officers that are out there working, so many of them, I know, feel so betrayed by the community. During the early parts of the COVID pandemic, they were out there working, people were seeing them and thanking them for doing their job. And then it all changed. And it's all these statements are out there. Like all cops are bad, or all cops are bastards, ACAB. This whole idea that came out about defunding law enforcement.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (25:14)
We understand that defunding isn't going to occur. Some places will take away some money from law enforcement, but unfortunately, our societies need public safety. But the bottom line is that for officers right now, it's a whole other level of stress. It's going in to do a job that people hate them for doing, but yet they feel it's their calling to help the community in that way. They don't know what to do. You know, I'm just speaking so generally, but they don't know what to do, because if we go out there and we look for like, what appears to be gang members driving around and try to stop the gun violence that's happening in this country and make traffic stops you know, because of that then people get criticized for doing that. And if we don't do anything, then we get criticized for not stopping the gun violence. Yeah. So it's a hell of a dilemma.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (26:12)
I want to make one comment on the officers that were there and then go over to this other piece. What it must be like for police officers working with the community with such outrage right now, the police officers that were there. Nobody would imagine themselves, or it would be hard to imagine telling the surgeon to stop on your first day in graduate school or so on. But I think there are a lot of people that would think that if I was there, I would've done something. Or if I was that police officer. Although, I think of the Milgram experiment, where they basically were trained to show, maybe it was that people from Germany were more susceptible to listening to authority than say people in the US.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (27:05)
And they the examiner telling the person to shock the subject who was also an actor and who was reacting and screaming and, you know, passed out and so on and just kept following the authorities orders and continuing to shock them despite getting all this feedback that this person was in so much pain. But I think, you know, everybody would imagine themselves saying if I was there and I was that police officer, and I saw this person getting kneeled on and they were screaming, crying for their mother that they would've done something. I think, yeah, unfortunately, these situations are so complex and it's unfortunate.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (27:47)
I mean, it happens in all sorts of places. Of course, the Zimbardo prisoner prison study is another example where they had to stop their study because these wonderful college students became brutal. And that was in a matter of a week. You look at the military and you see, how can you stand by and allow that to occur when people are doing things? So it's a good point. Had I been there? I would've said, Hey, dude, this, this is crazy. Like, get up, we have to move this guy. I hope I would've said that, but I wasn't there. And I don't know what I would've said. And that's the challenge.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (28:32)
And I think to your piece about the community's feelings towards police officers. I couldn't imagine what that has to be like for police officers right now, because I think that most would agree that there's systemic racism in the United States and that it affects on so many different levels. But also that I think most would agree that most police officers are going into this line of work because they're wanting to help. They're wanting to do good. And I think that they really are needed. I'm not as, not as in familiar with the defunding of the police, but I think one of the thoughts bringing in other social workers or things like that rather than just having law enforcement. But I think that, you know, it's such a complex issue and that it's really needed to have this aspect in our society for safety. But at the same time, yeah, it's a thankless job and especially right now.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (29:41)
Absolutely. You know, I work a lot with San Francisco PD and I've talked with a number of officers on the night that riots after George Floyd's death really hit San Francisco, and the number of officers that thought that night, that they were going to die there. I mean, I don't know how many, but I've talked to enough to know that it was a theme that they realized that they had no control of what was happening. They had to stand their ground in order to protect the city. They were being ordered by the city to do that. And at the same time looked up and down the lines of each other and thought, okay, well, some of us aren't going home tonight. We're going to die.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (30:28)
And they were being hit by multiple cocktails by rocks and bricks. And they did what they needed to do to try to protect the city. And I remember our mayor and all these other folks that wanted them there. They could have said, no, you guys could all go home. We're not going to ask you to do that, but they wanted them there. All of that trauma. And now you have to go back out and patrol that same city that had all these people that were kind of accurately trying to kill you that night.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (31:03)
I think of the folks, the capital police officers, a hundred, hundred and 50 were injured or something like that. I listened to a CNN interview recently of that one capital police officer who talked about what was the most vicious hand-to-hand combat he's ever experienced in his life. So it doesn't really matter whether it's coming from the left or from the right. You know, unfortunately, I think what happens is that law enforcement is society's lowest safety net. Like when society doesn't take care of a problem, dump it on law enforcement and whether it's mental illness, whether it's racism, whether it's politics, it ends up being law enforcement's problem. And law enforcement isn't designed to do any of that. It doesn't fix anything like that. It can be part of the solution, but it's not the solution.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (32:03)
Well, even like you're saying that there's a two-day or a four-day training, which is great, but there's definitely not the preparation. I would imagine not only does the person experience the riots and almost being killed by this large group of people, but then additionally you know, hearing this message from the community. I don't know what it's like when they're going out on calls, if it's even more vocal negativity or aggression or anger towards the police to kind of feel like everybody's against you. I mean, I don't know if you've heard any of that or that experience. Maybe before was whatever 20, 30%, or something. And I imagine it must feel like 60, 70% or something.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (32:58)
You know, I don't know what the percentage is. I think there is a great deal of support for law enforcement out there. But I think that they aren't vocal people, you know, they just sit quietly at home. And you know, look, I don't care where you live. You know, when I grew up in New York, I lived in some projects in Brooklyn, and in the projects, we all wanted to be safe. Like everybody wants to be able to walk from their home to the bus stop and, you know, do it safely. So it doesn't matter whether you live in, you know, Belvedere, or somewhere else, you want to have a safe place to come home to, and public safety, whether it's from police or from fire, I think we all want it. Unfortunately, like, imagine if you were standing out there and you were getting pelted and then people were saying, you know, we wish you had died.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (33:53)
And, you know, I personally lost friends because of having been a police officer and because I do therapy with police officers. I've lost friends who won't associate with me because of that. And even though knowing who I am in my history. So I think society has a lot to figure out and I think law enforcement needs to make some significant changes. You know, absolutely in agreement with that. And I don't think anybody in law enforcement would think otherwise. What those changes will look like, it's complicated. Who knows. I know Biden has a big plan or there's a plan going through the house and the Senate. We'll see what happens with that. But I also think society has to understand the position that they put law enforcement in, and the amount of distress that adds to everything else from law enforcement.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (34:50)
Yeah. I was thinking about it the other day. I don't know if you watch a TV show called Shameless at all on Show Time, but basically one of the characters, he becomes a police officer and he goes through working with different people and he's really wanting to do things right. And then one person just kind of avoids things. Cause they don't want to get into another person. She's very hard on everybody. And I was just thinking, my gosh, it must be very hard because where do you draw some of the lines? If like your partner or something, you know, turns without a turn signal on they're breaking the law. If someone was watching me at every moment when I was driving my car, you know, I'd probably get a lot more tickets. But then if the police are always kind of telling on each other, that would be really hard. So I imagine they then avoid that and you know, kind of support each other and brush that under. But then when there are major things that are happening or things that are getting more into that kind of grayer area, I imagine that must create that culture. That it's hard for people to say things about other police or their colleagues who are doing things that aren't right.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (35:59)
I think that's going to be one of the big changes that we'll be seeing. Again, think about as clinicians, when do you know any clinicians that you wouldn't refer a client to because you don't respect their clinical skills? But have you gone up to them and said, I think you need more training. I don't think you're a good enough clinician. Probably not.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (36:24)
And you know, what we are asking law enforcement to do certainly is that they have to take ownership, if they're seeing bad behavior by another officer, at least in California, and in other states, there are also numerous federal case decisions, you are legally responsible for stepping in and preventing that from occurring. And if you don't, then you are equally or to some measure, you are also responsible, and I think that's fine. I don't think anybody really objects to that and will be interesting to see how it changes.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (36:57)
But you know, my hope is that at some point the community could get back to seeing the difficult position that law enforcement is in. And supporting them psychologically, emotionally, and saying thank you when they see them. Because that all make an enormous difference when folks are out there.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (37:14)
So tell me a little bit about what your recent projects are, or what have you been working on? What are you seeing in the areas of mental health, whether related to first responders or not?
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (37:29)
Yeah, I'm trying to focus more of my training on resiliency. So I get out there ahead of the trauma and give people tools for managing the trauma. And so I'm very glad to be able to do that in two different police academies, the San Francisco police academy and the Sacramento police academy. So we're teaching these young people before they even start the academy, literally before they start the academy, we are starting teaching them about resiliency and what makes a resilient person versus someone who's less resilient. And then we are also doing advanced training with a lot of people who have been out there for a while. We're providing them with advanced officer or firefighter training on resiliency and what I always appreciate when I do a class like that, it can be very quiet in the classroom.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (38:26)
Like they're not asking a lot of questions, not a lot of feedback. It's not like teaching a bunch of therapists who have a gazillion questions. They tend to be very quiet, but then afterwards two or three will come up and say, you have a business card, and they won't say that in front of their peers, but they'll come up and ask for help. And that's part of it. I know May is mental health awareness month and it's all about reducing the stigma connected to getting help for psychological issues. And so I'm excited about resiliency. Let's try to get out ahead of the problem if we can.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (39:09)
Can you speak to some of the points that you actually cover with them around resilience here? What are the things that you talk about that they can be doing?
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (39:20)
Well, one of the things I talk about is a book I'm sure you know, Man's Search for Meaning, and in it, we talk about, in this discussion, we talk about how everything can be taken. As Frankel said, everything could be taken from somebody, but the freedom to choose. And we, you know, when I talk to the officers, I talk about knowing what is their why? And we do this quite a sort of lengthy exercise about that and understanding why did you choose to become a police officer? Why do you want to be a husband or, or a wife? Why do you want to be a parent? And that remembering your wives and staying true to your wives is a way to stay balanced. And we talk about everything from maladaptive coping strategies, or what's the difference between compartmentalization versus suppression.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (40:17)
Because when you're on a call and you see something really sad, or just incredibly traumatic, you have to compartmentalize all of that, because otherwise, you couldn't do the job. But then we discuss that. What you don't want to become is a sort of a hoarder of these compartmentalization boxes. And because at some point, those things will spill out, and then it's overwhelming. And so you don't want to cross over to suppression, because suppression doesn't work, but compartmentalization does. And what is the difference? And, when do you know if you need to come talk to somebody? And so all of those categories of things that we bring up and our goal is that when they leave the academy or when they advance officers, when they leave, they have a better understanding of what might happen to them and how they might respond to it. And at least when this is how you know when you're in trouble, psychologically. And get help. I know that San Francisco PD is going to be launching a program where they're going to train every officer and they're going to a class for every officer in resiliency. It's going to take a few years to get everybody trained, but that's their plan.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (41:33)
Oh, great. That's great that you're bringing in Frankel's work on Man's Search for Meaning. I mean, I think that's such a powerful book and, you know for, for those that aren't familiar, Victor Frankel had been, you know, in the Holocaust, in the concentration camps, and one of the things that he notices is how different people stayed alive or not, not just even physically, but mentally, and the aspect of that connection to meaning and having meaning and how that really helped drive one forward through such difficult times. And I think it also makes me think of acceptance commitment therapy and that idea of connecting to one's values and one's meaning, and then kind of going towards that despite you know wanting to avoid or wanting to, you know, kind of not deal with it or suppress or, or so on. so yeah, that's great. I think that's, that's super important.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (42:33)
Yeah. So that's the fun stuff we're doing.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (42:36)
Yeah. Well, that's great. So yeah, I really appreciate the time, you know, I think, I guess one last piece that I was just thinking about is, any thoughts or particularly on anything that they're doing in the work, in kind of the psychological aspects of understanding the systemic racism in the police experience and are part of, and encounter yeah. Is that brought in at all or is that because I feel like it's such a fruitful area for psychology and our awareness of ourselves and others and so on to bring in.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (43:20)
Well, I don't, you know, in terms like my role in terms of teaching resiliency or trauma, I don't get into that area of systemic racism, but I absolutely know that it's a part of training. I know there's a significant portion of academies where they talk about that and getting in there and I'm sure that there'll be more training coming out. And I think officers understand that there's been enough studies. I mean, there was that study that I think it was Oakland PD that looked at that more, I forget what the potential black people that got pulled over on traffic stops, but they were even being pulled over more by black officers. And so how, so we all have to kind of look at the way we carry that and, and what we do with, how does that affect the way we do our job? And I think that's absolutely true. And I think there's going to be a lot more training that will be coming down about that. And that's what makes me hopeful for the future, you know, George Floyd's death was a horrible tragedy, but you know, sometimes it takes a tragedy to make a significant change. And I'm hoping that that's what's going to happen.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (44:34)
Netflix has a TV show called Hundred Humans where they do these kind of different, you know, experiments, most of them benign, but there was one aspect where they, you know, were having people in a shooting range and they were having people that were, you know, people of color or not people of color kind of jumping out and whether they're shooting and, and basically finding that people were shooting more people of color, just people that weren't even police officers not even evolved. And, so just, how deeply ingrained this is into one's psyche and, and a number of the folks. And actually one of the people that they used that jumped out was one of the producers that had been working with the folks, you know, over weeks and so on during this filming of the series. And they were just in tears beside themselves, that they had, they had, you know, whatever ACC, you know, accidentally shot this person. But I think that there is, it is such a significant issue. And I think that I hope that more focus and more time and more training and more research goes into this cause it's, yeah. It, it, it plays into also the cycle of poverty and all these kind of things. It's so absolutely I think that, you know, so many police officers need support and need, you know, cause they are doing an extremely hard job.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (45:52)
And I think that, I mean, obviously for society itself, everybody needs to look at themselves when it comes to that. And how, how do we incorporate that in our own lives? And I think when you look at professions, I mean, I just look at the COVID vaccines and how certain communities were not getting the shots. Yeah. And they had a look at that, like, okay, why, what are we doing wrong? And maybe it wasn't that they would, I doubt any doctor was saying, well, we're just not going to give shots to this community. They just weren't taking into consideration what they needed to do to get shots to that community. Yeah. So I think it affects all aspects of our lives in every profession. But I anticipate that there will be lots more public safety or psychology-oriented classes that talk that officers will be getting that will talk about these issues.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (46:44)
Definitely. Well, Hey, Joel, I appreciate your time. And it sounds like you're doing wonderful work with the trauma work and the building resiliency and the crisis, you know, training for the police that is, you know, getting in situations where they're working with people with mental health issues. I really appreciate you taking the time today. Pleasure. Great.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (47:06)
Yes. Nice talking to you.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (47:08)
Okay. Great. Well, take care. Thanks.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (47:10)
You too. Bye.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (47:12)
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Welcome to Therapy on the Cutting Edge, a podcast for therapists who want to be up to date on the latest advancements in the field of psychotherapy. I'm your host, Dr. Keith Sutton, a psychologist in the San Francisco Bay Area and the director of the Institute for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Today, I'll be speaking with Joel Fay Ph.D., who is a clinical psychologist and served for over 30 years on the police force before becoming a psychologist, at Dolson Private Practice, and is the lead clinician for the West Coast Post-Trauma Retreat. He's also the co-founder and clinical director of the First Responders Support Network, will teach his crisis intervention training to police officers across California, has published many articles about emergency service stress, and is the co-author of Counseling Cops. Joel has received many awards for his amazing work, including the California Psychological Association 2007 Humanitarian Award and the American Psychological Association 2012 award for outstanding contributions to the practice of policy and public safety psychology. Let's listen to the interview.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (00:22)
Well, hi, welcome Joel.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (01:29)
Oh, thank you. Good afternoon.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (01:31)
Thanks for joining today. So Joel, you and I know each other from the Marin County Psych Association, even back before I was licensed, when I was back in grad school. I wanted to bring you on the show today and hear a little bit about what you've been doing lately. I know that you were a police officer and then you became a psychologist. You also have been involved in the West Coast Trauma Retreat program for first responders. I would love to hear a bit more about how you got to the work you're doing, and also get some thoughts on what's been going on. There's been a lot of focus on police, especially in the last year, over a year now.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (02:19)
Yeah. It's been a rough year for law enforcement in a lot of ways, but you're right, that's my background. I was a police officer for over three decades. I became a psychologist while a police officer and then got involved in working with the homeless and the mentally ill. And that was my role for about 11 years. And then I retired about 10 years ago and have been in private practice, but I do a lot of teaching, some consulting with the agencies, and then I see clients in between whatever else I'm doing. What I like about it is that I don't do the same thing every day and it gives me a lot of different challenges to deal with. And that makes life interesting.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (03:08)
Oh, great. Yeah. Tell me that story. How did you decide to become a psychologist and progress in that work from being a police officer?
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (03:19)
Well, there were a number of different factors that led to it, but at times it was a feeling that when I was talking to people, particularly younger people, that I wish their arrest was a significant moment in their life, obviously, and some of them had been arrested many times. But every time you go to jail, it's an opportunity for an intervention. And so I would want to talk to them and come up with something that I could say to them. I was a little naïve when I started grad school. I thought I would learn some magical things to say. I don't mean necessarily magical, but that I'd be able to say something and people go, “Oh, no kidding. This whole life I'm living is just not working.”
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (04:03)
And so, I soon lost that idea, but it was a chance to develop some skills to help me communicate better with people. And then it turned out to be something I really enjoyed doing. And I didn't think I would combine police work with psychology, but the whole crisis intervention thing hit the Bay Area around the mid-nineties. And that was something where I just happened to be in the right place at the right time. And I've been teaching crisis intervention for over 20 years. So I still get to make an impact and hopefully make a difference throughout California, because I teach in many, many different places throughout the state.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (04:47)
Okay, great. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about crisis intervention. I actually don't know about the history of that or how that got going.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (04:53)
Well, it started in the eighties in Memphis, Tennessee. A guy named Sam Cochran was the police officer. As a direct result of one individual who was shot and killed by the police, everybody -- police and the community -- everybody kind of felt that there just wasn't enough training for law enforcement on how to deal with people in crisis. So Sam Cochran and others created this four-day crisis intervention training, and that was sort of the generic model. Some agencies do two. Where I live and teach in Marin, we do four, and some agencies do five, but people make it work for their community. And it's the idea of giving police officers who deal with mental health calls and crisis calls constantly, it gives them an opportunity to have some skills that they otherwise wouldn't have learned.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (05:57)
And this knowledge is for a lot of people. Even when you sit down to say, “What is schizophrenia?”, there are still a lot of folks in the world that think that schizophrenia means you have multiple personalities. There was even that movie with Jim Carey or whatever. And so just to understand what a mental illness is like, particularly when we talk about the genetic components of mental illness, it helps to create empathy, because I think a lot of people feel that with mental illness it's because you use drugs or something like that. Or you grew up in a bad family. And so we get to explain what actually happens and why people get mentally ill and how much we don't know about why people become mentally ill. And we bring in people with mental illness to talk to the class and their families can come in. And so we do all these different things and then include lots of training on de-escalation and what is the current case law that's out there. And we talk about that. So there's a lot that we try to cover in that short period.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (07:04)
Sure. That sounds great. I mean, it sounds like you're reframing mental illness and particularly at least schizophrenia and understanding that it's something that's more biological and not just only drug-induced and so on and so forth. Helping them have a different perspective. This is somebody who is really struggling and needs help rather than somebody choosing to not get well or something to that effect.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (07:29)
Right. And the challenge of course for the officers is that they often see these folks that are out on the street who are using meth. And for so many people, so many of these folks, the meth use is either on top of schizophrenia or mental illness or it's separate. Either way, it looks the same. So they're overwhelmed with the number of people they're dealing with. It doesn't help that the mental health system is completely overwhelmed and underfunded and the laws that we have in place now were written back in 1967. And they haven't been updated since then. A slight update happened about 15, maybe 20 years ago, but that's about it. And so people go into the hospital and they get released from the hospital. The officers keep dealing with them over and over again, and eventually, they commit a crime and they take them to jail. And so they're very frustrated about why the mental health system isn't doing its job.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (08:29)
It ends up being just kind of a revolving door.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (08:32)
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (08:36)
Okay, well, that's great. So you're kind of really continuing in that work in the crisis intervention and education.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (08:43)
Right. And the officers are very receptive to it. Because it helps them tremendously.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (08:52)
Yeah. And can you talk a little bit about the West Coast Trauma Retreat and the trauma work that you do?
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (08:59)
Sure. So WCPR, which is the acronym for West Coast Post-trauma Retreat started back in 1999. It was a group of us that got together and our goal was to help prevent first responder suicides. And I don't know if your listeners know this, but the problem of suicide in the first responder world is a significant, enormous problem. Like last year, more officers died of COVID than anything else. It was like 200 around 250 officers around the country we know, died of COVID. Then the second greatest number was suicide. And if you add up all the other causes of death, like officers can die in a car crash or they can get shot by a suspect, or they could have cancer that's considered work-related and they die as a result of that cancer. You add up everything else and it doesn't equal how many officers died by suicide.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (10:07)
So yeah. And of course, COVID was beyond that. So, the purpose of the retreat was to provide a place where, well, we train, but we seek out and look for culturally competent clinicians and clinicians that understand public safety, police, fire, and EMS dispatchers. And that want to work with this population. And unfortunately, a lot of clinicians don't want to work with law enforcement. They see law enforcement in a certain way. And they don't have a great deal of empathy for them. And so when we finally convince an officer to use their EAP or their insurance, and they go and talk to a therapist and the therapist says things that are like, unbelievable. Some of the stories that I've heard, the officers go like, “Well, therapy's a bunch of BS.”
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (11:06)
And they just don't bother going back again. And now we've lost that officer who does need therapy. We've lost that officer and it's very hard to convince them to go back. So, what the retreat is, it's really when they're hurting, when they're hurting significantly. Most of the folks that come through there, almost everybody has a pretty decent posttraumatic stress diagnosis. Lots dealing with depression. Of course, a lot of anxiety, and a lot of suicidal ideations. Many of them have suicide attempts. Substance abuse is often a part of life, because alcohol, it's accepted within the public safety culture. You know, they don't smoke a lot of marijuana or anything like that, but they'll drink. And so that ends up becoming a coping strategy and then that ends up becoming a disaster.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (12:04)
And our goal is to give them a chance. We like to say that we're a get back to life program as compared to a get back to work program. So some of the people that come to our program are working and are able to go back to work and continue working. And some that come to our program aren't working, they've been taken off of work. And some are able to go back and some make the decision, or are simply unable to go back to work. They can't get recovered enough to pass an evaluation to return to work.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (12:36)
Are there many too that actually don't even want to go back to work? I actually very early on, I worked with somebody who was in training and they were shot and did some trauma work around it, but they were kind of like, you know what? They decided, this is not the direction for their life.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (12:52)
Yeah, absolutely. Some of them make that decision of, I just don't need this anymore in my life. You know, it's not what I wanted. Of course, once you get shot, how do you go back out on the streets again. We call it the myth of invulnerability.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (13:16)
And so in the academy, you get all this training and you learn how to shoot your gun, and you're wearing a ballistic vest, and you have all this cool equipment. And so there's this myth that you inherit that's like, as long as you do everything we tell you to do, you'll stay safe. But then something, you go on a call and maybe you get shot, or maybe someone just points a gun at your face or something else like that. And then you realize, Wow, I almost died. There was nothing I could have done at that moment just to not die. I just didn't die. Like they didn't pull the trigger, the bullet missed, or whatever it was. So now that myth of invulnerability is shattered.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (14:00)
And then it's, well, how do you go back to work once it's shattered? And some people do, and they learn to live with that understanding. But for some folks, it's just a bridge too far, they can't do it. But I also think that the bigger problem is getting people to get help when they need it – the stigma against getting help or being perceived as weak. And, you know, you and I are from the Bay Area and everybody's got a therapist – or so it seems, you know – or you can go to a cocktail party and say, you know, I was talking to my therapist the other day and nobody bats an eye. But there are lots of places in this country where you can't do that. And so getting people from those parts also to get help is very difficult. And so, the bigger challenge is encouraging responders to take care of themselves and to get help before it becomes overwhelming.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (15:02)
One form of trauma that we're talking about is the trauma of potentially somebody shooting at you or getting hurt or something like that. But I mean, there's also the trauma of seeing others that have been hurt. And also about, I don't know what it's termed. I was talking to somebody in relationship to veterans, but a moral injury when someone you know hurt someone else, and has regret for having hurt or taken a life or whatever it may be.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (15:37)
Yeah. Moral injury is something I'm talking about a lot more with first responders. In the way I look, a moral injury involves guilt and shame, whereas trauma typically involves fear. And so that guilt and shame, responders often have this idea that they want to make a difference. And then when they show up and they can't – they're doing CPR on that infant, but the infant doesn't survive, or they don't save the kid that fell into the pool. Or they go on a call and here's this three-year-old, that's been horribly, sexually abused. They walk away from those things with vicarious trauma, but they also walk away from that with the sense of, my whole purpose is to make a difference, and yet, in this case, I couldn't make a difference.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (16:33)
And so one of the things that responders do is, as weird as this sounds, they blame themselves. And after having seen this so many times, I have my own little theory on this. And what I think is that if you blame yourself, that's something you have control over. So, you know, if you were a firefighter, Keith, and if only you had gotten here a little bit faster, you probably could have saved that child. Or, you know, if when the call came out, you weren't in a bathroom or something, or you weren't taking a shower or something. And so you look for the reasons why that horrible tragedy that occurred was somehow your fault. And in doing so, it gives you more control.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (17:27)
We can prevent these tragedies from happening in the future. You just have to make sure you don't screw up. And then we can make sure they don't happen. And often when you talk to them, they will argue with you. When you see people that are absorbing this guilt of responsibility, they will argue with you about why you're wrong. And even like, if I only had been working that day, that wouldn't have happened. And you know, well, what's the option? Like, are you going to work every day, 365 days a year for the rest of your career? And then what about the other shifts? Because you do have to sleep so it's, you know, they really work out a way of figuring out why they were at fault. And that's another part that we have to challenge and all that's around that moral injury.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (18:21)
Definitely with that shame, particularly also with victims of trauma, is very common in clients that I work with too. And even if the person was like abused as a child or so on, oftentimes this shame of if I had done something different or if it had stopped, so on. Because you're saying that, if that's not true, then life is even more unpredictable and anything can happen, and that's even more terrifying, because ultimately anxiety wants certainty. And if there is no rhyme or reason and there was nothing that could be done, that's oftentimes even more terrifying. So it ends up getting turned inward, which ends up being very painful in an attempt to cope.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (19:14)
Absolutely. You know, if you've talked to a five-year-old, then they'll tell you that the reason that daddy or mommy beat them was because they didn't eat their dinner. And all they have to do is eat their dinner and they don't get beaten. Of course, they don't understand, well actually daddy and mommy are alcoholics and have violent rages and it has nothing to do with your dinner. But you need to believe it had to do with something, because if it just could happen at any time, for any reason, that's just too overwhelming. And that's sort of the same thing in a, sort of a more sophisticated way. It's the same thing that responders do.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (19:52)
Well, so let's even extend this. If we could talk about what's happened with George Floyd and Brianna Taylor and you know, just a number of minorities that have been murdered in the line. But I think there's this trauma that people of color experience because of that sense that there may be no rhyme or reason of how one ends up dying at the hands of police or so on. And people have been aware of this, but to a much, much greater societal level in the last year.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (20:44)
I'd be interested in your thoughts on what's going on and your thoughts on police. I was trying to talk with a family member about the aspects of the police that were bystanders, or I wouldn't even say bystanders, were involved while George Floyd died. You know, the aspects of how the police system sets limits on each other or intervenes with each other or so on and the rules around being quiet and not saying anything. It's just, there's so much there.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (21:26)
I think that's a good question. First, almost every officer I know looks at the George Floyd thing and is disgusted by what they saw. In de-escalation, everybody understands sometimes, but not everything is de-escalate. Not every person could be de-escalated. And sometimes the only thing you can do is use force, but let's just say, you know, once you get that person on the ground and you get them in handcuffs, then you move them to what is called the position of recovery. Everybody gets it and, and kneeling on somebody for whatever it was nine minutes and something it's just insane. I mean, nobody can even understand why you would do that. But connected to that when I think of the officers that were there, I think there were three officers that are still facing charges, three or four. I'm not sure, but I think that two of them had literally days on the job.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (22:31)
Literally like two or three days on the job. And one of them actually said, you think we should move him and was shot down. You know, about that suggestion, there are laws out there that deal with the duty to intervene. But the challenge specifically for that situation, was, given the culture, there isn't that a two-day officer that is going to go up to his training officer or an officer with 20 years on and shove him off of somebody, and maybe there has to be something like that. But if that had happened, if one of those officers had said, we're just knocking this guy off of Floyd. And they do that. Then clearly Floyd wouldn't have died and those officers would've been fired.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (23:26)
Because of doing what they did, knocking off a senior officer. And then none of this would've made the media, there wouldn't have been any video to be shown and of course a man's life would've been saved. So I'm not minimizing that, but there has to be something in the culture, the public safety culture that allows that to occur. But, I would ask anybody that listens to this, I know this is primarily for therapists, but you know, like what would you have done in your second day in graduate school? You know, when you're watching a therapist or what would a surgeon do if they're sitting in? A doctor on their second day of medical school is observing a doctor, would they have the courage to go say, I think you're doing that surgery wrong, and push the doctor away from the surgery table.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (24:18)
I think it's, some intervention should have occurred. It's sad that it didn't, it's a tragedy. And ultimately I think it's a crime and officers around the country will learn from that. And I think that we'll make a difference. I also just want to say that for the officers that are out there working, so many of them, I know, feel so betrayed by the community. During the early parts of the COVID pandemic, they were out there working, people were seeing them and thanking them for doing their job. And then it all changed. And it's all these statements are out there. Like all cops are bad, or all cops are bastards, ACAB. This whole idea that came out about defunding law enforcement.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (25:14)
We understand that defunding isn't going to occur. Some places will take away some money from law enforcement, but unfortunately, our societies need public safety. But the bottom line is that for officers right now, it's a whole other level of stress. It's going in to do a job that people hate them for doing, but yet they feel it's their calling to help the community in that way. They don't know what to do. You know, I'm just speaking so generally, but they don't know what to do, because if we go out there and we look for like, what appears to be gang members driving around and try to stop the gun violence that's happening in this country and make traffic stops you know, because of that then people get criticized for doing that. And if we don't do anything, then we get criticized for not stopping the gun violence. Yeah. So it's a hell of a dilemma.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (26:12)
I want to make one comment on the officers that were there and then go over to this other piece. What it must be like for police officers working with the community with such outrage right now, the police officers that were there. Nobody would imagine themselves, or it would be hard to imagine telling the surgeon to stop on your first day in graduate school or so on. But I think there are a lot of people that would think that if I was there, I would've done something. Or if I was that police officer. Although, I think of the Milgram experiment, where they basically were trained to show, maybe it was that people from Germany were more susceptible to listening to authority than say people in the US.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (27:05)
And they the examiner telling the person to shock the subject who was also an actor and who was reacting and screaming and, you know, passed out and so on and just kept following the authorities orders and continuing to shock them despite getting all this feedback that this person was in so much pain. But I think, you know, everybody would imagine themselves saying if I was there and I was that police officer, and I saw this person getting kneeled on and they were screaming, crying for their mother that they would've done something. I think, yeah, unfortunately, these situations are so complex and it's unfortunate.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (27:47)
I mean, it happens in all sorts of places. Of course, the Zimbardo prisoner prison study is another example where they had to stop their study because these wonderful college students became brutal. And that was in a matter of a week. You look at the military and you see, how can you stand by and allow that to occur when people are doing things? So it's a good point. Had I been there? I would've said, Hey, dude, this, this is crazy. Like, get up, we have to move this guy. I hope I would've said that, but I wasn't there. And I don't know what I would've said. And that's the challenge.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (28:32)
And I think to your piece about the community's feelings towards police officers. I couldn't imagine what that has to be like for police officers right now, because I think that most would agree that there's systemic racism in the United States and that it affects on so many different levels. But also that I think most would agree that most police officers are going into this line of work because they're wanting to help. They're wanting to do good. And I think that they really are needed. I'm not as, not as in familiar with the defunding of the police, but I think one of the thoughts bringing in other social workers or things like that rather than just having law enforcement. But I think that, you know, it's such a complex issue and that it's really needed to have this aspect in our society for safety. But at the same time, yeah, it's a thankless job and especially right now.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (29:41)
Absolutely. You know, I work a lot with San Francisco PD and I've talked with a number of officers on the night that riots after George Floyd's death really hit San Francisco, and the number of officers that thought that night, that they were going to die there. I mean, I don't know how many, but I've talked to enough to know that it was a theme that they realized that they had no control of what was happening. They had to stand their ground in order to protect the city. They were being ordered by the city to do that. And at the same time looked up and down the lines of each other and thought, okay, well, some of us aren't going home tonight. We're going to die.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (30:28)
And they were being hit by multiple cocktails by rocks and bricks. And they did what they needed to do to try to protect the city. And I remember our mayor and all these other folks that wanted them there. They could have said, no, you guys could all go home. We're not going to ask you to do that, but they wanted them there. All of that trauma. And now you have to go back out and patrol that same city that had all these people that were kind of accurately trying to kill you that night.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (31:03)
I think of the folks, the capital police officers, a hundred, hundred and 50 were injured or something like that. I listened to a CNN interview recently of that one capital police officer who talked about what was the most vicious hand-to-hand combat he's ever experienced in his life. So it doesn't really matter whether it's coming from the left or from the right. You know, unfortunately, I think what happens is that law enforcement is society's lowest safety net. Like when society doesn't take care of a problem, dump it on law enforcement and whether it's mental illness, whether it's racism, whether it's politics, it ends up being law enforcement's problem. And law enforcement isn't designed to do any of that. It doesn't fix anything like that. It can be part of the solution, but it's not the solution.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (32:03)
Well, even like you're saying that there's a two-day or a four-day training, which is great, but there's definitely not the preparation. I would imagine not only does the person experience the riots and almost being killed by this large group of people, but then additionally you know, hearing this message from the community. I don't know what it's like when they're going out on calls, if it's even more vocal negativity or aggression or anger towards the police to kind of feel like everybody's against you. I mean, I don't know if you've heard any of that or that experience. Maybe before was whatever 20, 30%, or something. And I imagine it must feel like 60, 70% or something.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (32:58)
You know, I don't know what the percentage is. I think there is a great deal of support for law enforcement out there. But I think that they aren't vocal people, you know, they just sit quietly at home. And you know, look, I don't care where you live. You know, when I grew up in New York, I lived in some projects in Brooklyn, and in the projects, we all wanted to be safe. Like everybody wants to be able to walk from their home to the bus stop and, you know, do it safely. So it doesn't matter whether you live in, you know, Belvedere, or somewhere else, you want to have a safe place to come home to, and public safety, whether it's from police or from fire, I think we all want it. Unfortunately, like, imagine if you were standing out there and you were getting pelted and then people were saying, you know, we wish you had died.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (33:53)
And, you know, I personally lost friends because of having been a police officer and because I do therapy with police officers. I've lost friends who won't associate with me because of that. And even though knowing who I am in my history. So I think society has a lot to figure out and I think law enforcement needs to make some significant changes. You know, absolutely in agreement with that. And I don't think anybody in law enforcement would think otherwise. What those changes will look like, it's complicated. Who knows. I know Biden has a big plan or there's a plan going through the house and the Senate. We'll see what happens with that. But I also think society has to understand the position that they put law enforcement in, and the amount of distress that adds to everything else from law enforcement.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (34:50)
Yeah. I was thinking about it the other day. I don't know if you watch a TV show called Shameless at all on Show Time, but basically one of the characters, he becomes a police officer and he goes through working with different people and he's really wanting to do things right. And then one person just kind of avoids things. Cause they don't want to get into another person. She's very hard on everybody. And I was just thinking, my gosh, it must be very hard because where do you draw some of the lines? If like your partner or something, you know, turns without a turn signal on they're breaking the law. If someone was watching me at every moment when I was driving my car, you know, I'd probably get a lot more tickets. But then if the police are always kind of telling on each other, that would be really hard. So I imagine they then avoid that and you know, kind of support each other and brush that under. But then when there are major things that are happening or things that are getting more into that kind of grayer area, I imagine that must create that culture. That it's hard for people to say things about other police or their colleagues who are doing things that aren't right.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (35:59)
I think that's going to be one of the big changes that we'll be seeing. Again, think about as clinicians, when do you know any clinicians that you wouldn't refer a client to because you don't respect their clinical skills? But have you gone up to them and said, I think you need more training. I don't think you're a good enough clinician. Probably not.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (36:24)
And you know, what we are asking law enforcement to do certainly is that they have to take ownership, if they're seeing bad behavior by another officer, at least in California, and in other states, there are also numerous federal case decisions, you are legally responsible for stepping in and preventing that from occurring. And if you don't, then you are equally or to some measure, you are also responsible, and I think that's fine. I don't think anybody really objects to that and will be interesting to see how it changes.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (36:57)
But you know, my hope is that at some point the community could get back to seeing the difficult position that law enforcement is in. And supporting them psychologically, emotionally, and saying thank you when they see them. Because that all make an enormous difference when folks are out there.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (37:14)
So tell me a little bit about what your recent projects are, or what have you been working on? What are you seeing in the areas of mental health, whether related to first responders or not?
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (37:29)
Yeah, I'm trying to focus more of my training on resiliency. So I get out there ahead of the trauma and give people tools for managing the trauma. And so I'm very glad to be able to do that in two different police academies, the San Francisco police academy and the Sacramento police academy. So we're teaching these young people before they even start the academy, literally before they start the academy, we are starting teaching them about resiliency and what makes a resilient person versus someone who's less resilient. And then we are also doing advanced training with a lot of people who have been out there for a while. We're providing them with advanced officer or firefighter training on resiliency and what I always appreciate when I do a class like that, it can be very quiet in the classroom.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (38:26)
Like they're not asking a lot of questions, not a lot of feedback. It's not like teaching a bunch of therapists who have a gazillion questions. They tend to be very quiet, but then afterwards two or three will come up and say, you have a business card, and they won't say that in front of their peers, but they'll come up and ask for help. And that's part of it. I know May is mental health awareness month and it's all about reducing the stigma connected to getting help for psychological issues. And so I'm excited about resiliency. Let's try to get out ahead of the problem if we can.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (39:09)
Can you speak to some of the points that you actually cover with them around resilience here? What are the things that you talk about that they can be doing?
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (39:20)
Well, one of the things I talk about is a book I'm sure you know, Man's Search for Meaning, and in it, we talk about, in this discussion, we talk about how everything can be taken. As Frankel said, everything could be taken from somebody, but the freedom to choose. And we, you know, when I talk to the officers, I talk about knowing what is their why? And we do this quite a sort of lengthy exercise about that and understanding why did you choose to become a police officer? Why do you want to be a husband or, or a wife? Why do you want to be a parent? And that remembering your wives and staying true to your wives is a way to stay balanced. And we talk about everything from maladaptive coping strategies, or what's the difference between compartmentalization versus suppression.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (40:17)
Because when you're on a call and you see something really sad, or just incredibly traumatic, you have to compartmentalize all of that, because otherwise, you couldn't do the job. But then we discuss that. What you don't want to become is a sort of a hoarder of these compartmentalization boxes. And because at some point, those things will spill out, and then it's overwhelming. And so you don't want to cross over to suppression, because suppression doesn't work, but compartmentalization does. And what is the difference? And, when do you know if you need to come talk to somebody? And so all of those categories of things that we bring up and our goal is that when they leave the academy or when they advance officers, when they leave, they have a better understanding of what might happen to them and how they might respond to it. And at least when this is how you know when you're in trouble, psychologically. And get help. I know that San Francisco PD is going to be launching a program where they're going to train every officer and they're going to a class for every officer in resiliency. It's going to take a few years to get everybody trained, but that's their plan.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (41:33)
Oh, great. That's great that you're bringing in Frankel's work on Man's Search for Meaning. I mean, I think that's such a powerful book and, you know for, for those that aren't familiar, Victor Frankel had been, you know, in the Holocaust, in the concentration camps, and one of the things that he notices is how different people stayed alive or not, not just even physically, but mentally, and the aspect of that connection to meaning and having meaning and how that really helped drive one forward through such difficult times. And I think it also makes me think of acceptance commitment therapy and that idea of connecting to one's values and one's meaning, and then kind of going towards that despite you know wanting to avoid or wanting to, you know, kind of not deal with it or suppress or, or so on. so yeah, that's great. I think that's, that's super important.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (42:33)
Yeah. So that's the fun stuff we're doing.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (42:36)
Yeah. Well, that's great. So yeah, I really appreciate the time, you know, I think, I guess one last piece that I was just thinking about is, any thoughts or particularly on anything that they're doing in the work, in kind of the psychological aspects of understanding the systemic racism in the police experience and are part of, and encounter yeah. Is that brought in at all or is that because I feel like it's such a fruitful area for psychology and our awareness of ourselves and others and so on to bring in.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (43:20)
Well, I don't, you know, in terms like my role in terms of teaching resiliency or trauma, I don't get into that area of systemic racism, but I absolutely know that it's a part of training. I know there's a significant portion of academies where they talk about that and getting in there and I'm sure that there'll be more training coming out. And I think officers understand that there's been enough studies. I mean, there was that study that I think it was Oakland PD that looked at that more, I forget what the potential black people that got pulled over on traffic stops, but they were even being pulled over more by black officers. And so how, so we all have to kind of look at the way we carry that and, and what we do with, how does that affect the way we do our job? And I think that's absolutely true. And I think there's going to be a lot more training that will be coming down about that. And that's what makes me hopeful for the future, you know, George Floyd's death was a horrible tragedy, but you know, sometimes it takes a tragedy to make a significant change. And I'm hoping that that's what's going to happen.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (44:34)
Netflix has a TV show called Hundred Humans where they do these kind of different, you know, experiments, most of them benign, but there was one aspect where they, you know, were having people in a shooting range and they were having people that were, you know, people of color or not people of color kind of jumping out and whether they're shooting and, and basically finding that people were shooting more people of color, just people that weren't even police officers not even evolved. And, so just, how deeply ingrained this is into one's psyche and, and a number of the folks. And actually one of the people that they used that jumped out was one of the producers that had been working with the folks, you know, over weeks and so on during this filming of the series. And they were just in tears beside themselves, that they had, they had, you know, whatever ACC, you know, accidentally shot this person. But I think that there is, it is such a significant issue. And I think that I hope that more focus and more time and more training and more research goes into this cause it's, yeah. It, it, it plays into also the cycle of poverty and all these kind of things. It's so absolutely I think that, you know, so many police officers need support and need, you know, cause they are doing an extremely hard job.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (45:52)
And I think that, I mean, obviously for society itself, everybody needs to look at themselves when it comes to that. And how, how do we incorporate that in our own lives? And I think when you look at professions, I mean, I just look at the COVID vaccines and how certain communities were not getting the shots. Yeah. And they had a look at that, like, okay, why, what are we doing wrong? And maybe it wasn't that they would, I doubt any doctor was saying, well, we're just not going to give shots to this community. They just weren't taking into consideration what they needed to do to get shots to that community. Yeah. So I think it affects all aspects of our lives in every profession. But I anticipate that there will be lots more public safety or psychology-oriented classes that talk that officers will be getting that will talk about these issues.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (46:44)
Definitely. Well, Hey, Joel, I appreciate your time. And it sounds like you're doing wonderful work with the trauma work and the building resiliency and the crisis, you know, training for the police that is, you know, getting in situations where they're working with people with mental health issues. I really appreciate you taking the time today. Pleasure. Great.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (47:06)
Yes. Nice talking to you.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (47:08)
Okay. Great. Well, take care. Thanks.
Dr. Joel Faye, Ph.D.: (47:10)
You too. Bye.
Dr. Keith Sutton, Psy.D: (47:12)
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