Major
Biological Sciences
Advisor
Cook, Nathan
Advisor Department
Psychology
Date
5-2025
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Abstract
Firefighters experience immense job-related stress. Firefighters can respond to hundreds of traumatic calls or critical incidents throughout their careers. Witnessing a critical incident can be highly stressful and mentally taxing. Therefore, some fire departments offer mental health resources such as Critical Incident Stress Management/Debriefing (CISM/D) and Peer-group support to help firefighters cope with stressful incidents. Additionally, firefighters may seek professional mental health treatment. To investigate firefighters’ perceptions regarding the effectiveness of these resources, an anonymous survey of Rhode Island firefighters was conducted. The sample included 51 firefighters (n = 51), was mostly male (90.2%), and self-identified as predominantly white (94.1%) race. The average age was 48.6 years old, with an average of 24.2 years of experience as a firefighter. Firefighters were asked to rate the effectiveness of CISM/D, peer-support groups, professional mental health treatment, and exercise for managing job-related stress on a scale of one to ten (1 = not at all effective, 10 = extremely effective). The majority of firefighters believed these resources were effective. Firefighters perceived exercise to be the most effective means of coping with job-related stress (mean = 8.0, SD = 1.9), and CISM/D was the least effective (mean = 6.45, SD = 2.5). Firefighters reported perceiving peer-support groups (mean = 7.0, SD = 2.0) and professional mental health treatment (mean = 7.63, SD = 1.8) to be effective as well. The results suggest that firefighters perceive various mental health resources as effective for managing job-related stress.