First responders across Martha’s Vineyard — police, firefighters, and emergency medical services — regularly confront traumatic scenarios.
Think about this summer alone: Lifeguards, police, and first responders rushed to a remote stretch of beach at Long Point trying to rescue a father who ultimately died saving his sons from a rip current. And police and ambulance crews were first on the scene after a child was seriously injured in a severe electric dirt bike crash. While there’s often an immense outpouring of community support for victims in an accident, often forgotten are those first responders who have to witness the aftermath in their line of duty. What happens to them after they see such a horrific tragedy, and what is the responsibility of the community they serve when it comes to being sure they get the help they need?
A new $1 million initiative to provide mental health services is now available in collaboration with Martha’s Vineyard Community Services (MVCS) to help treat those impacted by the suffering and loss of life they encounter when they respond to a call.
Amy Carter, who speaks nationally as a expert on suicide prevention and psychological resilience for law enforcement officers, signed on to help all departments, in collaboration with MVCS as the Island’s first-ever first responder support specialist, available to all Island emergency services personnel. Even though Carter has been working with Island departments individually over the past year, it wasn’t until just last week that her full-time Island position was finalized.
Right now, Carter works with fire departments and local EMS for critical incident response. For local police departments, however, she is available at all times, not just for critical incidents but to improve the quality of their daily lives. Carter said talks are ongoing with local fire departments as to whether her support for them will evolve into a full-time position as well. “They are like family members to me,” Carter said.
“Our officers take care of everybody, and I feel like Amy Carter takes care of us. She is incredible, and she is so professional. And I love that this is happening for the Island,” West Tisbury Police Chief Bradley Cortez said.
He said that the West Tisbury Police Department has already utilized Carter twice this summer, once for a suicide and also after the incident at Long Point.
“In policing, people say, ‘Nothing happens on the Island,’ but we seriously have experienced situations that most people will never encounter … fatal accidents, suicide, injuries; we have seen and handled all kinds of traumatic events,” Cortez said. “Amy Carter saves lives.”
An anonymous donor is donating $200,000 a year for the position for at least the next five years to cover the new model’s expenses and pay Carter, Oak Bluffs Police Chief Jonathan Searle said. Carter is employed as a contractor at MVCS under a memorandum of understanding with the Martha’s Vineyard Law Enforcement Council.
“Officers have been praised for their ability to compartmentalize, something which is useful during a call, but becomes a barrier to their own protection,” Carter said. “One of the most damaging things I hear said of officers is, ‘They knew what they signed up for.’ But there’s a big difference between having an awareness of occupational risk and having immunity to human suffering.”
Carter is already familiar with local police officers through an initiative to support their mental health that started last year when Carter joined the Oak Bluffs Police Department as a mental health specialist. She was on call for the department’s officers following critical incidents. The Oak Bluffs Police dedicated $15,000 of its budget for officer wellness services, Carter was hired on a per diem basis, and it wasn’t long before she started helping other departments, Searle said.
Searle said word quickly spread to officers in other Island police departments after he hired Carter as a mental health specialist. At the request of Carter, he then convened the Island’s six police chiefs for a meeting in November last year, which Carter attended to discuss the possibility of a regional mental health specialist.
“It weighed increasingly heavily on my heart not to be supporting the other departments, so I asked Chief Searle if I could have just 15 minutes in front of the other chiefs, and he wasted no time making it happen,” Carter said. “To their credit, every single chief was on board by the end of that 15 minutes.”
Searle contacted the MVCS about creating an Island-wide position that would not draw resources from existing programs, and an anonymous donor eventually made a five-year commitment to fund Carter’s position at MVCS.
Carter’s path toward this work began in a police academy, where she initially intended to improve civilian mental health response. But she quickly saw how much trauma officers carry and how little was done to help, she said. Carter said the isolation of living on an Island can make it even harder for officers and first responders.
“The harder someone is to reach, the more my heart softens for them,” Carter said. “It’s our responsibility to protect and defend not only their psychological stability … but their right to live a peaceful and fulfilling life,” she added.
Searle echoed the importance of Carter’s law enforcement background and, combined with her mental health training, said it makes her uniquely suited for the role.
“When you have your moment of trauma, your critical incident moment, and you need a proper diffusion of what happened … it’s someone you get to know and learn to trust, not some random person,” Searle said. It helps now that this is a full-time position, and Carter is available to them more often, he added.
Carter’s work schedule will typically be 30 hours a week remotely, and with monthly on-Island availability, depending on the demand for services and the needs of the individual she is working with.
“It’s important for me to understand the officer for who they are and what their unique history of personal experience has been. They deserve for me to understand the depth of their pain and feel it with them,” Carter said.
Abigail Foley, chief clinical officer at MVCS, said the program is overseen and run by local chiefs, and MVCS is there for support.
“The MVCS has taken a collaborative approach to support the program, but the day-to-day operations are run out through Chief Searle and other chiefs on Island,” Foley said in an interview with The Times. “I think it’s so important to help sustain a healthy workforce and reduce the stigma for first responders receiving mental health support. We want to make sure people who respond to those incidents get the support they need.”
Both Searle and Carter highlighted the cumulative nature of a job that exposes them to trauma regularly. Those aiming to work a full career, whether it be policing or firefighting, face years of difficult experiences, and the goal is to address problems early, rather than letting them compound from one traumatic incident to the next. Searle said that officers typically try to work a full 35-year career before retirement.
“Culmulative [post-traumatic stress disorder], it’s not one particular thing. It’s a series of things that has built up,” Searle said. “We aren’t getting out of here without a little bit of PTSD, but we want to mitigate the effects of it and the harms it causes.”
Local officers have previously said that while first responders have always accumulated trauma, they historically lacked a support system to help them appropriately manage it, layered with an implicit message from society that they should not need help. Searle said they hope to change the status quo and equip officers to deal with trauma.
Searle, who has been instrumental in improving mental health awareness for those emergency workers dealing with cumulative trauma, said his urge to help was initiated by his experience as a young officer on-Island. He said at the time when officers sought help after a traumatic experience, they were often met with disapproval.
“I was raised in a way when you didn’t talk about your feelings, and it was all just a part of the job, but it has to be, ‘Yeah, it’s a part of the job, but we are going to take the time to mitigate what the trauma does,’” Searle said.
Carter said she aims to equip officers with the tools to need her less, not create recurring patients. The long-term goal is to reducing police suicide rates. Police officers, according to the National Library of Medicine, are at a 54 percent higher risk of committing suicide than civilians.
“The danger of suicide in law enforcement is that the effects of cumulative trauma may be gradual. They may be imperceptible to others, but they are certain,” Carter said. “Over time, the ability to sleep, to connect with others, to regulate emotions, to concentrate, to feel safe, or simply enjoy life can be diminished. And the Catch-22 is that as the disconnect progresses, the less aware the officer becomes that they are slipping away, and therefore the less capable they become of doing anything about it.”
Carter said that her familiarity to the challenges emergency service workers face, particularly police, can help lower barriers for local officers.
“We have lowered the barriers together with mutual trust and respect, and are redefining seeking support as a strength, not a weakness,” Carter said.
Carter will speak about the new Martha’s Vineyard model for officer mental health support at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the largest policing conference in the world in October in Orlando, Fla., alongside Cortez and Searle, who will speak on the logistics of the model.
“If we could help out other agencies to let them know the beneficial factors coming from Amy Carter and our Island’s local law enforcement, then I can’t wait to shed that light on it,” Cortez said of the conference in October.
“You can have a much healthier and happier career if these systems are in place,” Searle said. “I look at it from an employer perspective. If I am treating my officers with care and compassion, then they are going to go out on the street and treat the people they have to deal with with the same care and compassion.”
