Mental illness a minefield for policing sector

By Lethbridge Herald on November 21, 2025.

Chris Schneider, Ania Theuer & Stacey Hannem
For the Herald

In October 2024, Lethbridge hosted the first Annual First Responders Suicide Awareness Conference. Suicide is tragic and the underlying conditions that lead to it are multi-faceted. The public has learned of two recent suicides of on-duty Manitoba Mounties, one in September and the other in October.

According to Bobby Baker, the prairie director for the National Police Federation, the union that represents frontline members of the RCMP, officer burnout and staffing shortages are among the primary drivers to increases in mental-health issues among officers.

While Baker asserts that “suicide and related rates in RCMP are just so incredibly high,” he suggests that available mental-health resources for officers are not the answer.

A February 2024 union report investigating mental health issues among Mounties identified a confluence of factors connected to recent increases in mental illness among the ranks including the stigma attached to mental illness by police. This finding exposes a fundamental tension in modern policing: some police acknowledge experiencing mental illness while also being tasked with policing mentally ill persons, who are viewed by police as a source of risk to the public.

This contradiction is unresolved and therefore complicates institutional police efforts to destigmatize and address mental health concerns among its ranks in any meaningful way.

It is well documented in the research literature on policing and mental illness and in public statements made by police administrators about mentally ill persons, that police perceive people with mental illness as likely to be aggressive, threatening, and potentially dangerous.

The perception of mentally ill persons as disproportionately dangerous is not well supported by evidence. Nevertheless, according to former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, police are “part of the mental health system – they are the front-line workers for of the most dangerous encounters.”

As additional evidence of the police belief that mentally ill persons are dangerous, one need only consider how police administrators routinely insist on their involvement in crisis response units that pair mental health professionals with police officers. If mentally ill persons were not perceived as dangerous, the task of responding to mental health calls for service would fall entirely upon mental health professionals alone.

Police responses to, and repeated claims about, persons assumed or considered mentally ill have contributed to stigmatic assumptions that link mental illness to perceptions of risk and danger. In other words, police responses to people with mental illness have affirmed and contributed to the very mental-health stigmatization that individual officers now face.

This raises a complicated and thorny question: If mentally ill persons are generally believed to be dangerous by police are mentally ill police officers also dangerous?

As we investigate in our forthcoming research paper “Policing Mental Illness and the Contradictions of Structural Stigma,” police have trapped themselves in a contradiction that revolves around their own construction of mental illness.

By continuing to reinforce stigma that is embedded in framings of mentally ill people as dangerous, police ensure their own legitimacy as first responders to persons in crisis. This, in turn, ensures that they are insulated from budget cuts that might reallocate funds to health and community services for mentally ill people. At the same time, the stigma of danger associated with mental illness risks damaging police legitimacy were police organizations to openly acknowledge the prevalence of mental illness within their own ranks to offer improved services and reduce stigma for police suffering from mental illness.

Increased openness about mental illness in policing, however, could seriously challenge current police responses to mentally ill persons.

One possibility is that by acknowledging the prevalence of mental illness among its ranks, police themselves become understood as a potential danger. This creates a situation in which increased attention to mental illness among first responders is likely to undermine public trust in police judgement and ability to respond to crisis situations. Public concern may raise calls for police suffering from mental illness to be disarmed and removed from duty.

Another possibility is that police, in acknowledging the prevalence of mental illness, will destigmatize mental illness and reassure the public that officers suffering from mental illness are not at increased risk of dangerous behaviour.

The outcome of this shift would be to undermine the stigma of risk attached to mental illness and to offer support for claims that police are not required to be the primary first responders to persons in crisis. This would lend legitimacy to calls for the reallocation of funds to other, non-police responses to mental illness like social service workers.

The decoupling of police as the primary first responders to mentally ill persons is one necessary step in ensuring institutional police efforts to address mental health concerns among its ranks so that members can feel supported in getting the help that they need.

Christopher J. Schneider is a professor of sociology at Brandon University, Ania Theuer is an assistant professor of sociology at Brandon University, and Stacey Hannem is a professor of criminology at Wilfrid Laurier University. They are co-authors of the forthcoming paper “Policing Mental Illness and the Contradictions of Structural Stigma.”