Welcome to Resilience Development in Action with Steve Bisson.

This is the podcast dedicated to first responder mental health, helping police, fire,

EMS, dispatchers, and paramedics create better growth environments for themselves and their teams.

Let's get started.

Okay. teams. Let's get started. Hey, like magic, we are back. I think that, you know, what I love about these great

interviews. And again, I'm going to try again your name. Joe Smarro is here again. Wanted a quick intro. We're having a great conversation. I want to shift gears because I think we talked a lot about departments and compartmentalization, challenging those thoughts for police and mental health, frankly, and frankly, the world, if you asked me, the BS, as you called it. and if you don't know what that is go back and

listen to the episode before we're not telling you sorry i got to promote my stuff too man but one of

the things that i know happens a lot with particularly first responders i kind of hinted at it the last

episode is that sometimes you do have your own challenges with mental help you know it's not but in

most departments it's fairly stigmatized.

I know there's been an evolution since I started in the, like late 1990s, early 2000s,

but that stigma still frankly exists.

I know that for you, you know, you've had some undaddressed trauma that kind of brought

in a little bit of this stuff.

How, you know, how did you realize all that stuff? How did you bring it up? And how did you deal with it?

Yeah. So I realized it really quickly when I got on the mental health unit. So my first five years on the department, you know, I'm just, I'm on patrol. I became an absolute mess.

My vice, my drug, if you will, became pornography and women. And so my first several years on the

department, I was just absolutely self-loathing, whatever I could do to just hate myself,

live with a ton of shame and regret. And so I'm making poor choice after

poor choice, but it never really bled into my job. So I was always early. I was a great cop. I

never got in trouble. I never got jammed up. But then when I went to the mental health unit and 100%

of my calls became mental health related, my choices started to catch up to me. So, you know,

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