Mental "hazmat": how to keep your head and home safe from contamination

If you’re a Simpsons fan, or you’ve owned a TV sometime in the last two decades, you probably know this image.  Dumb old Homer leaves his job at the power plant contaminated with nuclear material.  He finds it during his commute home and throws it out the window, where it lands on the sidewalk to slowly poison the town of Springfield[i]. 

This blog is for all of you who deal with mentally hazardous material at work.  I know many of you handle literal hazmat in the course of your work, but I will leave those tips to your safety officers and medical directors.  I’m here to talk to you about the mental “hazmat” and how to make sure it doesn’t ride home with you.

Mental hazmat takes a lot of forms, from the daily exposure to the darkness in people on up.  While my suggestions may be helpful for that kind of exposure, my main goal is to help you cope with the most toxic stuff, the mental equivalent of uranium or Ebola.  A prime example is people who specialize in child abuse and exploitation cases.  Most of us get squeamish or angry even thinking about a child being abused.  Immersing yourself in those situations every shift…pretending to sympathize with a suspect, normalizing his desires and actions…sitting with the numb children and the devastated families…it’s no surprise that this work can cause or aggravate psychological injuries.

Unlike physical hazmat, which is universally harmful, psychological hazmat can be more unique.  Viewing thousands of images of child pornography wouldn’t be anyone’s favorite day, but you might be more susceptible to a true psychological injury based on your individual history.  If you have developed hot buttons based on repeated experiences at work or in your childhood, then those situations are hazardous for you even though they’re not for others.  Let’s say you grew up witnessing domestic violence in your home and it had a deep emotional impact that hasn't healed yet.  Dealing with DV cases as a dispatcher, officer, or EMT might be more hazardous for you than for your colleagues who didn’t grow up exposed to that. In one way, psychological injuries are just like physical injuries: if they haven't healed, it hurts a lot more when you get hit in that spot.

For that reason, comparing your reactions to those of your colleagues adds insult to injury.  (You’re also comparing your insides to their outsides—you know every nuance of your internal reactions, but you can only infer a fraction of what’s going on inside a coworker.  This is generally NOT a winning strategy.)  When you’re in the red and they all seem fine, you just feel worse.  You start thinking I’m weak, I’m broken—one guess what that does for your emotional balance.

But since you can’t avoid mental hazmat, what’s a first responder to do?  Well, you could win the Powerball or become an internet celebrity, but perhaps I can offer you some less extreme and more realistic options.  Here are two things to start doing, and one thing to stop doing.

Start building safety protocols for your hazmat.  People who work with physical hazmat are trained and required to follow rigid safety protocols before, during, and afterward to reduce the chance of contamination as much as possible.  When it comes to mental hazmat, you’re left to your own devices.  That isn’t fair, honestly, but it is in your power and your best interest to develop your own mental safety protocols and stick to them. How will you prepare your mind before you start to handle mental hazmat?  If there is a mental “breach” while you’re handling it, what will you do to minimize the damage?  And when you’re done handling it, how will you mentally shower out so that it doesn’t follow you home? 

Start putting the worst experiences into words.  The other big difference between physical and mental hazmat is that you have the power to detoxify your mental hazmat.  Ebola will always be Ebola, and uranium stays radioactive for literally billions of years[ii]…but even after mental hazmat affects you, you can make it less hazardous.  You do that by putting it into words—the detoxification process is as straightforward as that.  Lay it out for a trusted friend, tell it to your therapist or chaplain, write it all down on paper.  The exact method is much less important than the decision and the courage to take that horrible material and bring it out into the light.

Stop ignoring the problem.  Ignorance is NOT bliss.  This is perhaps the biggest drawback to a culture of strength and self-containment: you expect yourself to be strong and self-contained 24/7/365, and it sure feels like others expect that of you too.  I’m not doubting your inner strength or your ability to put things into compartments, not at all.  But there is no human ability that is infallible—we are creatures who occasionally forget to breathe, for God’s sake—and holding yourself (or your colleagues) to perfection as the standard is bullshit.  Strength is one of the protective layers that insulates you from mental hazmat.  When something breaches that barrier, though, you’d better have a response strategy in place[iii]. 

As for compartmentalizing—it’s both good and necessary to put things in a box during a call.  But you don’t have unlimited storage space.  And if your mental compartments have started to resemble a hoarder’s living room, well…maybe it’s time to clean them out.

The bottom line: some material in your career will be hazardous to your mental health, and getting out ahead of that is far healthier for you (and your family—or did you think that hazmat only posed a risk to you?) than burying your head in the sand.

[i] How has this not been a Treehouse of Horror episode yet??

[ii] To be exact, 4.5 billion years per the National Institutes of Health.  At least if it’s uranium-238.

[iii] Preferably not of the liquid variety…