Responder Resilience

Terry Hastings didn't set out to become New York State's first Chief Wellness Officer. He built the case for the role one needs assessment, one training module, one hard conversation at a time.

He partnered with the Institute for Disaster Mental Health and the Benjamin Center at SUNY New Paltz to survey over 6,000 first responders statewide, the first assessment of its kind in New York. What they found: 16% reported suicidal ideation, four times the general population. Among dispatchers, it was 21%.

Now Terry's leveraging that data to lead the largest state-level wellness effort in the country.<...

The injury gets treated. The claim gets filed. The responder gets lost in between.

Retired Battalion Chief David Picone spent years inside a system that's supposed to cover everything: prevention, behavioral health, cancer, rehab, the claim itself,  and watched it fail at the seams. So he rebuilt it. Thirty-four integrated policies. Injury rates down. A wellness center built like a Division I athletic program. Now, as CEO of the Health & Safety Leadership Alliance, he's taking that blueprint national.

Dr. Ramsey Ali sees what happens when the system fails. As Director of the First Responder Institute a...

Twenty-five years later, 343 still means something. It's the number of FDNY members lost on 9/11. Now it's also the number of miles a five-day ride will cover, from Boston to the 9/11 Memorial in New York City.

Suzanne Stone, President and CEO of Livestrong, joins Responder Resilience to talk about the First Responder Ride for Resilience: why it exists, who's riding, and what it means for a first responder community still absorbing the cost of that day, and every day since.

Livestrong has spent almost 30 years working the "soft side" of survivorship, the part that isn't clinical...

"Cultural competence" gets thrown around a lot in mental health circles. Dr. Brooke Bartlett has a harder definition: specialized, ongoing training paired with hands-on experience- not a one-hour class, not having an uncle who's a firefighter, not a personality trait you either have or don't. Bartlett, licensed clinical psychologist and founder of the Center for Trauma, Anxiety, and Stress, joins Responder Resilience to unpack what it actually takes for a clinician to earn - not perform - fluency with the first responder population. She breaks down the fastest ways clinicians lose trust in a first session, why overcompensating with...

What happens when every traditional treatment fails — and a first responder is still drowning?

Retired FDNY-EMS paramedic and Army combat medic Carmine Fiore survived 30 treatment centers and 15 heroin overdoses before trying something the first responder world rarely talks about: Ibogaine-assisted treatment at Ambio Life Sciences in Tijuana, Mexico.

In this episode, Carmine joins host David Dachinger and psychedelic-assisted therapy provider Candace Maisel, LCSW, for a candid, deeply personal conversation about what it took to finally heal — and what that healing actually looks like.

In this episode:

She lost him. Then she found a way through.

Lt. James Crawford (Ret.) of the Chicago Police Department was a pastor, a mentor, and the man everyone leaned on. Months after retiring, he died by suicide. His wife, Erie S. Crawford, LSW, PhD — a licensed social worker who saw the signs — made a decision in her darkest hour: this loss would not take her too.

She buried him on a Saturday. By Monday, she was in therapy, fighting for her own healing. What she built from that fight is now helping suicide-loss families across the coun...

After 26 years as an FBI Special Agent — investigating fraud, corruption, and the schemes that cost people everything — Jerri Williams could have walked away quietly. She didn't.

She entered the Bureau in 1982 as one of the first Black female agents in FBI history. She worked the cases. She learned the truth. And when Hollywood started telling a different story, she wrote the book to correct it — literally.

Now she hosts FBI Case File Review, a true crime podcast with over 10 million downloads, and she's on a mission to preserve the real stories of the men and women...

The United States has one of the highest fire death rates in the industrialized world. Not because the firefighters aren't good enough. Not because the apparatus isn't fast enough. Because of culture.

Dr. Burton Clark has been saying that since 1970. He became a volunteer firefighter that year, a career firefighter two years later, and spent the next fifty-five years working at every level of the fire service — from neighborhood firehouses to the National Fire Academy to the halls of Johns Hopkins University. He has studied more firefighter fatalities than most people have had shifts. And the conclusion he...

A senior FBI agent heard Chaplain Cary Friedman deliver a eulogy. He was struck by something he couldn't quite name — the message was spiritual, but it wasn't religious. Universal without being hollow. A week later, Chaplain Friedman was at the FBI Academy in Quantico. He's been consulting to the Behavioral Science Unit ever since.

For more than two decades, Chaplain Friedman has been working with law enforcement officers across the country on something the behavioral sciences triad left out: the soul. Not religion. Not doctrine. The deeper thing that gets a person out of bed and into a...

Most psychologists who work with first responders come from the outside — and spend years earning trust. Dr. Carla Sutton Moore built her career from the inside out.

Twenty-five years in mental health. Over twenty devoted exclusively to law enforcement, firefighters, corrections officers, and 911 operators. Named Psychologist of the Year by the Fire Service Psychology Association in 2024. Vice-Chair of the IACP Police Psychological Services Section. Recipient of the City of Atlanta's 2025 Woman of Impact Award. And one of the most respected voices in public safety behavioral health working today.

In this episode, Dr. Moore pulls back th...

Daniel Sundahl ran calls for twenty years. As a career firefighter and advanced care paramedic in Alberta, Canada, he saw what the job builds in you — and what it quietly destroys. He didn't leave the profession when it got hard. He went deeper into it, earning credentials as a Registered Counselling Therapist and Trauma Specialist, and then wrote a book about what he learned.

UnStuck — now a bestseller — is a roadmap built specifically for people who've been trained to suppress, push through, and move on. In this episode, DanSun breaks down the Emotional Diagnostic Tool (EDT), explains why th...

Most fitness products make you a promise. And most of the time, six weeks later, they're collecting dust in a corner.

Khalil Zahar built something different.

He was finishing his master's degree in Toronto when he walked into a boxing gym and fell completely in love — training four or five times a week, getting into the best shape of his life. Then he noticed something almost absurd: even elite-level boxers were still counting their punches with a clicker.

An engineer saw a problem. FightCamp was born.

What started as punch-tracking technology fo...

They respond to the worst moments of people's lives — every single shift. Then they clear the call, restock the rig, and do it again. Nobody asks if they're okay. The system just keeps moving.

In this episode of Responder Resilience, we sit down with two people who decided that wasn't good enough.

Whitney Wilkerson (MDiv, BCC, NBC-HWC) is a board-certified chaplain, ordained interfaith minister, and trauma-informed wellness coach with 25+ years of experience supporting people through crisis — from pediatric hospitals to trauma centers to military burnout. Lucas Isola is a 15-year EMS veteran and Chief of the...

Sheriff Rosie Cordero-Stutz made history the moment she took office — the first elected Sheriff of Miami-Dade County in nearly sixty years, the first woman to hold the role, and the first Latina sheriff in Florida history. But making history was never the point. What she did next was.

In this episode of the Visionary Leaders series on Responder Resilience, we sit down with Sheriff Cordero-Stutz to talk about what it takes to lead the largest law enforcement agency in Florida — and how she's working to build a culture where asking for help is a sign of strength, not...

Burnout in first responders doesn't announce itself. It doesn't look like a crisis. It looks like a paramedic who still shows up, still runs the calls, still does the job — and feels absolutely nothing while doing it.

In this episode of Responder Resilience, Lt. David Dachinger (ret.), Dr. Stacy Raymond, and Bonnie Rumilly, LCSW, EMT have the conversation that first responder culture has spent decades making almost impossible to have.

What burnout actually is — clinically, culturally, and personally. Why the stoicism and dark humor that help providers survive the job can quietly acce...

Every LEO has a version of the glory days. The calls that reminded you why you signed up. The moments where the job felt like exactly what it was supposed to be — meaningful, necessary, alive with purpose.

Chris Littrell had those days.

But the other calls came too. They always do. The ones that don't debrief cleanly. The ones that follow you home in the dark and take up residence somewhere behind your eyes. Twenty years of them. And somewhere in the accumulation — the weight of the badge, the sile...

Donnie Woodyard has spent his career believing EMS can be better — and working to prove it.

If you've ever held multiple state licenses just to do your job, watched a talented medic leave because relicensing wasn't worth the hassle, or struggled to staff a mutual aid response with people you couldn't legally deploy across a state line — this conversation was made for you. And if you're a supervisor trying to keep the lights on while the conversation around you keeps shifting to innovation — you'll want to hear this too.

As Exe...

Most psychologists who work with law enforcement do it from a safe distance. They consult. They advise. They hand over a report and drive home.

Dr. Cherylynn Lee doesn't do that.

She works inside the Santa Barbara Sheriff's Office. Full-time. Every day. She's not observing the culture — she's inside it, earning trust in a world built, brick by brick, to never ask for help. She responds to active crises in the field. Sits on the crisis negotiation team. Has debriefed more than forty critical incidents — line-of-duty deaths, officer-involved shootings, mass casualty events — and then comes back t...

Kevin Hazzard spent a decade running calls in the worst sections of Atlanta — and what he learned there is at the core of everything he's written since. Three books. One relentless refusal to let the people who run toward the worst of it go unwitnessed.

He brought to light the buried legacy of Freedom House EMS — the Black men who invented modern paramedicine, set the gold standard for emergency medicine worldwide, and were then discarded from the story they authored. And then he took us 40,000 feet above the Atlantic, to the most dangerous air-medical rescue in history.

Law enforcement leadership is evolving, yet many organizations still operate under outdated assumptions about strength, resilience, and performance.

In this episode, David Dachinger and guest co-host Dr. Tracy Hejmanowski sit down with retired Chief Deputy Rosanne Richeal, Trauma-informed Executive Coach, and founder of The Richeal Group, to understand the conditions impacting leadership, performance, and culture in public safety.

Drawing on nearly four decades in law enforcement and emergency medical services, along with clinical training in counseling psychology and Marriage and Family Therapy, Rosanne challenges the belief that toughness alone...

Your nervous system doesn't know the call is over.

That's the reality for first responders — and the problem most conventional therapy wasn't built to solve. Dr. Joanna Rosen, psychologist and founder of Between Two Ears Trauma Consultancy, goes deeper than the story, deeper than the memory — all the way down to where trauma actually lives.

In this installment of our Clinician's Guide Masterclass series, Dr. Rosen breaks down Deep Brain Reorienting — DBR — a cutting-edge modality that's changing what's possible in trauma treatment, and explains why there's a critical difference between being trauma-informed and being trauma-competent.

For...

Cops don't break on the job. They break slowly, quietly, in the space between calls — carrying everything they've ever seen, heard, and survived until the bucket finally overflows.

Dr. Stacy Raymond knows what's in that bucket. She's sat across from officers who've held it together for decades — on the street, in the squad room, at home — until they couldn't anymore. Her book, Dump the Bucket: Healing Trauma in Police with EMDR, doesn't deal in platitudes. It deals in truth: that the trauma destroying officers didn't always start on the job. And that EMDR might be the most powerf...

Jimmy Van Wattum knows what it’s like to carry the weight of the job long after the shift ends. In this episode, we get inside Jimmy’s story—the pain he couldn’t shake, the breaking point that sent him searching for help, and how he turned raw trauma into a hard-fought promotion.

Jimmy doesn’t pull punches. He talks straight about the moment he realized therapy wasn’t a last resort, but a lifeline, and how EMDR became the tool that helped him process what the job throws at you. This is post-traumatic growth in real time: s...

There’s no playbook for what happens after the sirens fade. In this episode, retired FDNY EMT Carmine Fiore lays it all bare—addiction, painkillers, the battle to hold it together at home, and the brutal truth of what first responders carry long after the shift ends. No sugarcoating, no clichés—just raw honesty, grit, and the kind of redemption story that cuts through the noise. This is what it means to fight for your own life after spending years saving everyone else’s.

Carmine takes us inside the struggle to find meaning and connection in a world w...

In this episode, Lynette Shaw Butler—retired LEO with a psychology degree, advocate, and educator—pulls back the curtain on the unseen toll of growing up in the shadow of childhood trauma and responding on some of America’s toughest streets. On the job, the trauma she’d buried for so long erupted, and suddenly survival meant facing herself as much as any threat outside.

Lynette’s story is one of grit, vulnerability, and the fierce drive to transform pain into power. In this raw, unflinching episode, she lays bare what it takes to go from broken to unbreak...

In this episode, we sit down with Commander Eric Tung, the visionary behind Blue Grit, who’s on a mission to elevate the lives and careers of Law Enforcement Officers. Get ready to delve into the art of resilience—how can we not only strengthen ourselves but also inspire those around us? 

We’ll explore the nuances of communication across generational lines, drawing on Eric's two decades of experience in the field. With a sharp focus on vulnerability and self-awareness, he unpacks the concept of “true accountability” in policing, pushing the boundaries of what it means to lead with i...

Imagine a system that tracks not just the nature of the calls we do, but the hidden costs of cumulative trauma, organizational stressors, and behavioral health risk. This is a high-stakes conversation about resilience in a field where the emotional toll can be as devastating as the physical one.

This episode plunges into the raw, unfiltered world of firefighters and their mental health, inspired by Christopher Velasquez’s groundbreaking work, “Firefighter Mental Health Exposure Program.” 

We dissect a grim reality: While first responders log near misses and toxic exposures, their psychological scars go unchecked. Velasquez, a veter...

In this episode of "Visionary Leaders Masterclass," we sit down with Sheriff Robert Jonsen of Santa Clara County, a true pioneer in law enforcement leadership. With four decades of experience, including transformative roles as Chief of Police and a certified Compassion Cultivation instructor, Sheriff Jonsen represents a new wave of leaders redefining what it means to serve and protect.

We discuss Sheriff Jonsen's insights on the most pressing stressors facing public safety professionals today. How does he envision a culture in which seeking help is not a sign of weakness but a demonstration of strength? We’ll ex...

In this episode of Responder Resilience's Visionary Leaders Masterclass, Fire Chief Nick Marsan from Westport, CT, shares his mantra: “Mission First, People Always.” This phrase isn’t just a slogan; it’s a guiding principle that can reshape leadership in the fire service.

We explore the critical intersection of leadership and mental health, discussing how to make mental wellness a core operational value. What daily actions must command staff take to foster this mindset? How can we create a culture that normalizes mental health discussions and encourages first responders to seek help?

This episode is a crucia...

In this episode, we speak with retired Lt. Randy Sutton, a man whose own life is a testament to the trials faced by those in blue. Founder of The Wounded Blue, Randy sheds light on the stark reality of physical and emotional injuries sustained on the job, illuminating the journeys of the more than 17,000 officers he has helped. 

A catalyst for change in Law Enforcement, Randy discusses the impactful services provided by The Wounded Blue and unpacks the powerful motto, "Never forgotten, never alone." We also touch on the poignant themes from his compelling book, "Rescuing 911: The F...

Join us as we confront the critical issue of first responder mental health and explore the vital role of chaplaincy in emergency services. We learn about the GY6 Initiative a powerful movement led by Chaplain John Revell, born from heart-wrenching loss yet driven by an unyielding mission: to save lives. 

What drives rescuers to the brink, and how can we change this tragic narrative? From debriefs to vital resources, we're unraveling the complexities of mental wellness in high-stakes environments. This isn't just another story; it's a clarion call to action, a testament to resilience against the silent e...