Woodstock’s fire department is the first in Ulster County to provide training in maintaining the mental health and well-being of first responders. About a dozen members so far have taken the resiliency class taught by the county sheriff’s office, which has been adapted from a program at the FBI tailored toward police, fire and EMS workers.
“It was identified that first responders were dying more by suicide than line-of-duty deaths,” said Woodstock fire chief Patrick Rose. “And that there was major burnout and dropout as well as a significant amount of divorces in first responders, and a whole bunch of different things that were showing that first responders were being negatively impacted in their life by their profession.”
The assistance is designed to help through knowledge of financial help, outreach programs, retirement planning and other avenues.
The fire department has appointed a wellness coordinator, Jessica Rose, to roll out the resiliency program in 2025.
In a complementary program called CISM (Critical Incident Stress Management), a specialty team does a debriefing after particularly stressful or traumatic calls. Woodstock has a CISM-trained officer, chief Rose said.
“Before the bad call happens, it [the resiliency program] keeps them in good headspace, and then the CISM response is an after-action after that incident happens,” Rose explained. “Everybody that took the class really found out a lot about themselves and how they can work with others. Everybody came out with a new vision of how they can help help the first-responder community.”
Woodstock, as the first department in the county to receive the training programs, can help other communities.
“If the need arises, we can work with people from other departments, so at any time, we’ll be helping out someone from a neighboring department or a department across the county,” Rose said. The ultimate goal is to have resiliency-trained officers across the county, including EMS, police and dispatch.
The 24-hour resiliency training involves a lot of reading and interactive sessions.
“We had to do group breakouts,” Rose said. “We had homework we had to do. It was very interactive training, and it was a lot about communications. We learned about all the different pillars of wellness.”
Woodstock personnel participated for two weeks in a condensed class in four-hour blocks at night and an eight-hour Saturday.
“We wanted to make sure it was done before the holidays so that way we could get our program up and running for 2025,” Rose said.
The training won’t be mandatory. “We don’t want to force people into it, but the goal is as more people get trained, more people will see its benefit and they’ll also want to attend the training,” Rose said.
Traditionally, first responders keep their feelings bottled up. There’s often a stigma associated with seeking help.
“We want to create a new paradigm of emergency services where this idea of getting help and seeking help and providing help is there, compared to the old adage of ‘You just suck it up and you deal with it’,” Rose said. “The concept is to actually seek help, and it also trains people to see people that need help and aren’t willing to ask for help themselves.”
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