As a woman, a veteran, and a volunteer firefighter/EMT seeking to normalize mental health care in the Fire and EMS community, I often face not only gender bias but also cultural bias. The closed culture and conventional wisdom of Fire and EMS say that asking for help is weakness and that the best EMS providers and firefighters can handle anything. This isn't true, and my brothers and sisters in the community are suffering because of it. Almost 75% of the firefighters, paramedics, and EMTs in the United States are volunteers, balancing families, full-time jobs, and other obligations while serving their community. They do not get days off; the pager could sound anytime. Subject to the same traumas as any paid department, volunteers often struggle with mental health concerns, including compassion fatigue, burnout, and even PTSD and stress-related illness that affects every area of their lives. Making this situation even more dire is the fact that suicide is one of the leading causes of death among fire and EMS first responders. This is unacceptable, and yet there is a distinct lack of resources for volunteers, who are exposed to trauma after trauma while immersed in a culture that believes burnout is an unavoidable part of the package. I am passionate in my belief that my fellow volunteer first responders do not have to live that way. We can thrive amid these traumatic events and have the emotional resources to help ourselves and those we care for. To do that, we need to start teaching our firefighters and EMS providers from their first day on the truck that they matter, that their mental health is important, and that asking for help is a sign of strength and maturity. We also need to start combating these long-entrenched beliefs that mental health issues equal weakness. My work as a doctoral student in Traumatology seeks to study the effects that the Fire/EMS culture has on its newest members. Still, more importantly, I seek to design and implement change in the culture that will normalize mental health, highlight the desperate need for trauma-informed mental health providers who are familiar with our experiences, and provide new firefighters and EMTs with the knowledge and tools they need to protect their mental health successfully. Serving our communities should not cost us pieces of ourselves and our sanity. I hope to find new ways to serve those who are serving others, and be able to help volunteer first responders keep their joy and fulfillment in serving without feeling as though it will take everything they have to keep going.

On Memorial Day 2017, I received the call that no parent ever wants to hear. My 19-year-old son Alex had been in a head-on collision at highway speed, and was being rushed into surgery. A thousand emotions rendered me speechless as I listened to my sister, an employee at the hospital, tell me the gruesome details of his injuries. Every word she said seemed to pull me into a deeper state of shock. I was four states away, and there was no possibility of getting to him for many more hours. Then she said something that I will never forget. "It's pretty bad, but the ambulance got to him in time." Those words were like a lifeline, something I could hold on to. They kept me sane throughout the night as I waited for information and scrambled to get there. Somewhere, there was a team of people who literally scraped my son off the road and saved his life. They knew what to do, knew how to do it, and did it efficiently and professionally. They didn't know me, didn't know Alex, but because of them, I had hope--and my son had a chance at survival. I joined my local volunteer fire department a few months later. He's getting married in a few months, and it's because of a fire/EMS crew that he's here at all. I have proudly served as a volunteer EMT for the last five years, and I recently became an instructor. I'm incredibly passionate about training the next generation of EMTs, not just in medical knowledge and procedures, but in the incredible privilege we have to care for our fellow humans. They're not puzzles to be solved, they're people with stories and families and memories. Our work sometimes makes it possible for them to go on making new memories with the people they love, and there's no greater gift than knowing that we can make that difference. On my darkest day, an EMS crew gave my family hope. For me as a volunteer, every day is a chance for me to be that hope for someone else.