02/18/2026
No one should suffer in silence or be punished for seeking help. 🖤💙🖤 🖤❤️🖤 🖤💚🖤
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Suffering in Silence: When a Police Officer Chooses Mental Health and Pays the Price – By Stop The Threat - Stop The Stigma Founder and Wisconsin Police Captain Adam Meyers, CPS
For many police officers, the badge is not just a job. It is a lifelong dream.
The dream to become a police officer begins in childhood, watching officers serve their communities, believing in justice, honor, and purpose.
It grows stronger through academy training, long nights of studying case law, grueling physical tests, and the pride of pinning on the badge for the first time. Becoming a police officer isn’t accidental. It’s intentional. It’s a calling.
But what happens when the very profession built on strength and resilience becomes the source of silent suffering?
Police work exposes officers to trauma most people will never witness: fatal crashes, abused children, suicides, violence, death notifications, and the constant readiness for danger. Over time, those calls don’t just stay on the radio. They stay in the mind.
An officer suffering in silence often becomes an expert at hiding it. They show up early. They volunteer for overtime. They laugh in the briefing room. They tell everyone they’re “good.” Inside, however, depression slowly takes root. Sleep becomes broken. Irritability increases. Joy disappears. The things that once felt meaningful begin to feel heavy. The uniform starts to feel like armor, not just against physical danger, but against emotional exposure.
There is fear in admitting the struggle. Fear of being labeled weak. Fear of losing credibility. Fear of being deemed “unfit for duty.” So they keep going. Until they can’t.
Making the decision to take a leave of absence for mental health is not weakness. For many officers, it is the hardest and bravest decision of their careers. It means acknowledging, “I’m not okay.” It means putting personal survival above professional image. It means risking reputation for recovery. And often, it is done with hope. Hope that the department will understand. Hope that leadership will support them. Hope that the culture that preaches wellness will actually stand behind it. But sometimes, that hope is met with silence.
While on leave, the phone stops ringing. The group texts stop. The check-ins never come. Supervisors don’t reach out. Colleagues disappear. An officer who once felt like part of a brotherhood or sisterhood suddenly feels erased. Ignored. Ghosted. Forgotten. The silence becomes louder than any radio call.
Instead of feeling supported, they feel abandoned. Instead of encouragement, they feel suspicion. Instead of compassion, they feel distance. Depression deepens in isolation. The sadness becomes heavier. There is a profound loneliness in realizing that the profession you would have given everything for may not give anything back when you are struggling.
When termination follows, after choosing to work on mental health, the emotional impact can be devastating. It’s not just losing a job. It’s losing identity. Losing purpose. Losing the childhood dream. Losing the future, you envisioned.
For someone who built their entire adult life around being a police officer, termination can feel like a death. A death of who they thought they were. Questions flood the mind: Was I only valued when I was useful? Was I disposable? Did asking for help cost me everything?
Hopelessness creeps in. Feelings of doom settle over the future. The sadness can become suffocating. For some, suicidal thoughts may surface and not because they don’t care about life, but because the pain feels unbearable and the identity loss feels catastrophic.
When your dream becomes your downfall, the grief is complex and profound.
The greatest wound is often not the trauma from the streets, it is the realization that when they chose to put themselves first, to seek healing, they were treated as a liability instead of a human being. An officer may think: “I gave this job everything.” “I missed holidays.” “I ran toward danger.” “I carried other people’s worst days.” And when they finally said, “I need help,” they were met with distance, paperwork, and ultimately separation. That betrayal cuts deep.
Yet even in that darkness, there is truth. An officer who chooses their mental health is not weak. They are courageous. Their value does not disappear with a badge. Their identity is bigger than a department. Their worth is not defined by termination
The profession must do better. Wellness cannot be a slogan. Peer support cannot exist only in policy manuals. Leaders cannot preach resilience while abandoning those who show vulnerability. Because behind every badge is a human being.
And when that human being suffers in silence, steps away to heal, and is met with abandonment, the damage reaches far beyond one career. It sends a message to every other struggling officer watching.
The message should never be: “If you ask for help, you will lose everything.” It should be: “If you ask for help, we will stand with you.”
Until that culture truly changes, too many officers will continue to suffer quietly, torn between their lifelong dream and their basic need to survive. And no badge should ever cost someone their life.
Pictured is Captain Adam Meyers, CPS in 2021 when he was a Wisconsin Police Detective. In January 2022 he was diagnosed unfit for duty due to his poor mental health stemming from his critical incident - deadly shooting. He was approved a 90 day leave of absence and began working on his mental health. The police department did not extend his leave of absence when it expired and terminated him in April 2022. He had been with the police department since 2008.
www.stopthethreatstopthestigma.org
