Let that sink in. Probably the one profession on this damn planet which everyone can agree is not for personal profit, which only does good for the world, where the people are of a much higher caliber of human than your average schmuck on the street – and they are 10x more likely to kill themselves than the average schmuck on the street.
I’m trying desperately hard to find some kind of divine logic in the state of human existence. But everything points to the good ones suffering and dying off while the douchebags assume total control.
5 comments
Your story got me into research mode. This 10x thing is true of all first responders!! The thing that seems to really get to them is child death. It seems these folks need a lot of support and generally don’t feel they should ask for it.
It is as if they would start crying and never stop if they ever let themselves feel what they feel after dealing with the kind of tragedies that grieve them the most.
I couldn’t make it that far into it, but it makes sense that they’d get really messed up by stuff like child deaths. I bet seeing suicide is another tipping point, since suicide seems to be contagious. It really sucks, it’s like the people who care the most are the ones who fall prey to suicide most often.
That they care is key. In turn they need cared for. If they have someone to talk to when they need to be heard it seems they handle it much better.
First responders emotionally distance themselves most of the the time but some of those calls they go out on just will not leave their minds.
Fun factoid: EMTs have the highest on the job injury rate of any profession. It seems people in pain often take swings at these workers.
But yeah, I could image how seeing a suicide could be a tipping point.
I’ve been a goddamned lathe operator. We’re 1.32x more likely to kill ourselves. Like .01% more than firefighters, so ha. But at least we’re all not marine engineers. Let’s all have a moment of silence for marine engineers.
That is right about the lathe operators. And then 1.89x for the marine engineer. As a once proud airline mechanic of nearly 20 years myself, there came the time to step back and see the pain of the job for what it was and leave the field. Though I loved the work, the working conditions came at a higher cost than I could keep paying.