We Are Failing Our First Responders- And Calling It Strength
In EMS, we are trained to run toward chaos. We are taught how to manage airways, hemorrhage, cardiac arrest, psychiatric emergencies, wreckage, overdoses, screams, blood, and silence. We are drilled on protocols, algorithms, muscle memory.
What we are not trained for is what happens after the call clears.
No one teaches you how to carry the weight of seeing people on the worst day of their lives — over and over — and still show up for the next one like nothing happened.
No one teaches you what to do with the faces you can’t forget.
Or the kids.
Or the smells that come back out of nowhere.
Or the quiet drive back to the station where you replay every decision, every “what if,” every thing you wish you could undo.
We normalize things that should never be normal.
We joke.
We compartmentalize.
We swallow it down and go available again.
Because that’s the culture. Be tough. Don’t be “that person.” Handle your shit. Don’t slow the crew down.
And slowly, quietly, something inside people starts to erode. We call it burnout, but burnout isn’t the problem.
Burnout is the symptom.
The real problem is that we ask human beings to function like machines in systems that never stop demanding more.
More calls.
More overtime.
More coverage.
Less sleep.
Less processing.
Less support.
We send crews into trauma with barely enough staffing, barely enough rest, barely enough resources — and then we act surprised when people break.
Or worse — we don’t act surprised at all.
We wait until someone is:
• Snapping at partners
• Calling off constantly
• Numb, angry, disconnected
• Drinking too much
• Thinking about quitting
• Or thinking about not being here anymore
Then suddenly we care.
Suddenly there’s a hotline number.
Suddenly there’s an EAP flyer taped to the wall.
Suddenly there’s talk about “mental health.”
But mental health shouldn’t show up after someone is drowning. The silence is part of the trauma.
The fact that you can run a pediatric arrest and then immediately be sent to a lift assist like nothing happened — that does something to a person.
The fact that you can pronounce someone dead and then eat cold food in the rig — that does something to a person.
The fact that you’re expected to carry it quietly, professionally, without disrupting the flow — that does something to a person.
And if you start feeling anxious, depressed, angry, detached, exhausted, or hollow?
We quietly frame it as a you problem.
“Maybe EMS isn’t for you.”
“You need better coping skills.”
“Have you tried self-care?”
As if candles and deep breathing can fix systemic harm.
Let me say this clearly:
If you are struggling, you are not weak. You are not broken. You are not failing.
You are responding normally to abnormal, repeated exposure to trauma, in a culture that rewards silence and endurance over healing.
Strength in EMS has been defined as how much you can take without breaking.
But real strength is being honest about what the job costs, and refusing to pretend that cost doesn’t matter.
We don’t need tougher first responders. We need safer systems.
We need:
• Mental health support built into the job, not added as an afterthought
• Leaders trained to recognize trauma, not dismiss it
• Space to decompress before someone hits a breaking point
• A culture that allows people to say “this is affecting me” without fear
And maybe most of all, we need to stop glorifying suffering as proof of dedication.
Because the truth is:
You can love this job and still be harmed by it.
You can be good at what you do and still need support.
You can be strong and still deserve care.
If you’re an EMT, a medic, a dispatcher, a police officer, a first responder reading this and thinking, “Yeah… this hits,” you are not alone. And you don’t have to carry it all by yourself.
It’s time we take care of the people who show up when everything is falling apart.
Not after they break.
Not after they leave.
Not after it’s too late.
Now.
Because this is what lives in the space between calls.
