Healing the Hidden Wounds: A Conversation on First Responder Mental Health- Danny Coon

Host Jerry D. Lund: Hi everyone and welcome to this week's episode of Enduring the Badge Podcast. I'm your host, jerry Dean Lund, and I don't want you to miss an upcoming episode. So please hit that subscribe button and, while your phone is out, please do me a favor and give us a review on iTunes or our Apple Podcast. It says, hey, this podcast has a great message and we should send it out to more people. So please take that 30 seconds to a minute to do that review and just maybe by doing that it will push this up into someone's podcast feed that really needs this message. Number one I'm super excited to announce that I've teamed up with an incredible person, and that person is Dr Tia White. She is a public safety, wellness and empowerment specialist. Together, we have combined our knowledge and expertise to create a five day training course. Now that training course, you can attend different days of that training course, whichever ones fit you, but day one would be peer support and how to structure that and get your team up and running and maybe some of the legalities about that. Days two, three and four are going to be about advanced wellness and sleep and finances and family dynamics and diet and nutrition Complete first responder for more details. 

Speaker 1: My very special guest today is Danny Coon. He is a retired sergeant from Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. He spent 30 years of his 31 long years in law enforcement on patrol. That is outstanding. I think that says a lot about Danny. He worked as a field training officer, detective and in the lead role as detective for a while and, of course, finishes his career as a sergeant. That's pretty impressive, i think. But now in retirement, Danny has created a whole new life for himself. He runs a website called the Bulletproof First Responder. Danny does a lot of blogging on that website and talks about post traumatic stress, injury and suicide prevention. He's very passionate about what he does. Danny is also written a book, so please listen to the episode and support Danny. Now let's jump right into this episode. How are you doing, danny? 

Danny Coon: I'm real good, jerry. Thank you for having me today. 

Speaker 1: I'm excited to have you on, Danny. this is I'm going to start. always start with the toughest question Tell the audience a little bit about yourself. 

Speaker 2: Thank you. I am retired Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff. I joined the department in 1981 and retired in 2013. So I did 31 years. 30 of those years I was assigned to various patrol stations where I worked as a patrol deputy, a train officer, a detective, a detective team leader and eventually I promoted to sergeant. for my last three years and I was a patrol sergeant I've worked all over the county of Los Angeles, from the Palisades Peninsula to the high desert area, including areas like Compton, south Los Angeles and East Los Angeles, and I spent a couple of years on a small island off the California coast which is called Catalina. It's roughly 22 miles and I worked there for seven years as a detective. It was kind of fun, but it was also a little stressful because you just saw weird, different stuff. So I enjoyed my 31 years. 

Speaker 2: I started blogging about four years ago after I retired 10 years ago. I started blogging about four years ago after my dad died and that kind of just brought out all kinds of the emotions and stuff that I was holding down for the last 31 years. And then, shortly after that, my wife was diagnosed with cancer and she had a low back to me, so a lower left part of her lung was removed and eventually it metastasized to her brain and she had a peach sized tumor peach pit sized tumor removed from her brain, the bright side of her brain. She's walking and talking today. She's basically what I will call a miracle in God and we're just happy for what she's able to do. 

Speaker 1: That is amazing Yeah. 

Speaker 2: And since then I really don't talk a lot about my personal stuff, but my blogs are more or less the why, what's happening to us and how and what we can do to minimize the effects of post-traumatic stress. 

Speaker 1: Yeah. So I mean, i'm going to touch on some of that is you're talking about, like why some things happen to us and stuff like that. What do you believe is the why? 

Speaker 2: The why is just the nature of our business. We deal with evil. Medics, firefighters, dispatchers, cops, everybody. We all deal with evil every day. We're born into a fallen world so when you see evil every day, you start internalizing it and then you don't follow the discipline that you need to keep your mind straight and the discipline is like what you would learn in the academy. The physical fitness portion of the stand and shape, the mental relaxation diets all of that all plays into us repressing or suppressing our emotions. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, so that's fascinating to me, and can you dive down a little bit more into that? 

Speaker 2: Well, it's we, because of our society the way it is, you know, obviously we've been, i want to say, somewhere around 177 years of public service and law enforcement, fire service, and when you just that guy called garbage in, and when you're taking all that garbage in, it affects you and most people will get through a career unscathed. But everybody's going to have some type of emotional suppression. It's I want brain dead for a second. It just sticks with you and you need to talk about it. 

Speaker 2: And our leaders, the administrators of the organizations that we work for, they need to start recognizing that there are issues with the worker bees and because what? basically what they're doing right now is kicking the can down the street. They they're more worried about I think sometimes they're golf handicap instead of what's going on within their, the people that work for them. They want to. Obviously they have the last couple years, issues with policing in general or the fire service in general. So it's it's just budgets and everything like that, so that they're not putting a lot of or a lot of money into mental health for the, for the workers. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, so you brought up something about like the, the academy and talking about you know the physical fitness standards in the academy and stuff like that, but what are the mental health standards in the academy? 

Speaker 2: There really aren't any that I know that I can remember of the know, the department I worked for has a psychological services unit, so it's I think they have like seven or nine psychologists working for and plus they started years ago before I retired peer counseling, where the deputies are trained to go up and just talk to other deputies because obviously the peer or the psychologists aren't all that trusted. But when I went through the academy in 81 and 82, they did not talk about mental health issues at all. It was not. I don't think I ever heard anybody talk about, you know, mental mental health issues until probably after I retired when I started hearing about the servicemen who are dying by suicide and their PTSD issues and I live next door to Camp Pendleton and anybody in the Marine Corps knows where Camp Pendleton is. Yeah, and I've come across a lot of young Marines who are separated or retired and talk to them about their mental health issues. Because I never really I always thought post-traumatic stressors just someone. I thought they were weak, i didn't think that they, i just I didn't believe them. And then I started realizing it and started talking to them and listening to their issues. 

Speaker 2: And then in about 2017-2018, i read an article where more firefighters and more police officers die by suicide every year than in the line of duty, and it's been going that way for at least since probably about 2015 or prior and the last couple of years. If you take out the COVID deaths, the law enforcement and firefighter suicides still outweigh it. In fact, as of today, there are 37 law enforcement, 22 firefighters and 6 EMS or our medics. There are total 65 suicides by those that group of people 37 fire police, 22 fire and 6 medics. That equates to one suicide for every 48 hours and this is the first time I've seen this getting quite a while. But so far this year 39 law enforcement officers have been killed in line of duty, 20 of them by violence, 18 by gunfire. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, on the other side of the firefighter side, 27 firefighters have had line of duty deaths and I got a little note out here on the firefighter side there have been 11 of the 27 deaths. 

Speaker 2: 11 of those were medical issues heart attacks, cardiac events and on the law enforcement side, for some reason the officer down Memorial page doesn't put heart attacks anymore, they just put medical issues. But it's pretty safe to say they were probably cardiac related and that's one of the big issues that we're dealing with and that goes into the other side of the young, the hypervigilance that we all go through. I mean firefighters do it, cops do it, medics do it, doctors do it dispatchers we all build up a hypervigilance to kind of save ourselves. And of those 65 suicides, they are just a rough guesstimate because traditionally, first responder suicides are underreported. So it's And there's two organizations Blue Help, which is documents they've been documenting law enforcement suicides for, i think, 2017. And then there's the firefighter behavioral health alliance, and they've been documenting a firefighter and medic suicides for several years too. So they're about the two best organizations to get your the statistics from. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, but you go on. On the suicide thing, it's amazing because the World Health Organization they came out and they guesstimate that 800,000 people a year take their lives worldwide And that's one suicide every 40 seconds. And I did the math last night because I didn't didn't seem right, but I did the math and yeah, that's about it. I did it and it came out as one every 39 seconds. So one suicide every 40 seconds is wild. And in 2019, 47,511 Americans died by suicide, making suicide the 10th leading cause of death. And the flip side, homicide in the United States was the 16th cause of death. So suicide is out of control. 

Speaker 2: We need to continue to educate people on how to deal with their mental health issues and with PTSD, and I call it post-traumatic stress injury, with a little I, because I honestly believe that it's not a disorder. A disorder is something totally different And, as one Army general once said after he lost his leg, i didn't die or I didn't have a leg disorder. I had my legs shot off. And he's right. You know he's calling it. A lot of people are calling injuries disorders and they're not. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, i think there's a very common argument about PTSD and PTSD and which is which and what is necessary to I want to call like diagnose, and you know why do we need to I maybe so focus on PTSD instead of PTSD or some other version of it. 

Speaker 1: And from what I've been gathering in the medical world, you know PTSD a lot of times is is used for medical like diagnosing, for insurance type of situations. I'm not trying to discount anybody with PTSD, ptsd, any of that type of stuff. It's just a very unusual circumstances that surround, i think, kind of the argument around it, kind of like you're saying like what the general is saying I like PTSD because I do think like if you feel like it's an injury, you can get over it, and I'd like to be positive about that type of stuff, but certainly there are people with PTSD for sure. Yeah, danny, so you know you're talking about, you know these careers and stuff like that, and you've had quite a long career or had a long career in law enforcement and you were talking about like no one you know gets through this and you know, without something right Did you go through 30 years of your career without any you know challenges with your mental health or anything like that. 

Speaker 2: No, i did not. I there were. There were times, and you know there's one incident that really struck me and I had a couple of incidents struck me and I had to deal with it. One of my documented in my blogs and it was a an incident where an 11 year old boy had killed himself and it happened 20 minutes before I got off work. I was the only unit that was available to respond. I responded, i got there and it was just when you see a kid laying on his mother's bedroom with a 357 in his right hand and his brain sitting on the left side of his body that that kind of gets you in, that that would hurt. And then, about a year before that, there was a traffic accident on two streets where the speed limits on both streets were 55 mile an hour. One car broadsided the other and the the lady and her three children that were in the car that ran the stop sign. They were all killed on impact and that kind of that sticks with you. You know there was a. 

Speaker 2: In our field of work, the most common call that affects first responders is the death of a child, and those are the ones that stick with you the most. Those are the ones that hurt. I can tell you I don't know how many baby not breathing calls I've gone to over 30 years, but I can tell you I got at least one save, and when you can at least save one, that's it. That kind of comes up Everything else, but those are some of the things that happened. You know I was involved in a couple of shootings where the suspect died and that kind of fixture. And then obviously I spent a week at the Los Angeles riots in 1994. That got me, just because of the photo of violence and everything that you see every during the during that time, just the lawlessness, just get the. That affects you a little bit too. 

Speaker 1: I want to touch on that. So do you think like the total disregard for the law and stuff like that, that really gets pretty much most first responders? because we are, for the most part, law abiding citizens and we want to enforce those laws and rules and stuff like that And we're very structured. So when we see something that dramatic being taken place that you think that hurts us a little deeper. 

Speaker 2: Yes, it does, because we are. We took this job because we want to make a difference. You know, i jokingly say I want to take, i wanted to drive fast and take bad guys. A gentle, we took this job because we wanted to make a difference in our society. That's, that's how we were wired from, from the very beginning. It's. I truly believe being a first responder is a is a calling. It's as a friend of mine, michael MC Williams, who runs a law enforcement blog and website, because he calls us ordained by God. We were told by God to to do this work And that's the way we do it. And every time you see something you know nobody dislikes a bad cop more than a good cop Right. And when you see cops messing up, and then you see society messing up, it's just like really, come on, we all have to live here. We're in this world together. Let's, let's get this done and do what's right. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, for some for some reason it's not, you know, public as I want to do it. And then our media and social media they downplay everything. Yeah, just yesterday I was watching, a commercial came on And a prominent comedian is now getting his own show as a judge And as a judge or whatever his name is, and it's like, really, is this how you're you're discounting and downplaying society? Now you're making a joke out of it on TV And you know you got the real shows. But then you have all these stupid shows that that show cops and firefighters in a bad light And show them that it's okay to do this And it's okay to riot And it's okay. And then. And then our social media is. I just got an email, an alert, that says our meeting is supposed to start. Yeah, it's rough, It's just up to daycare There's a half hour ago. But yeah, just, you know, the news media is just totally I don't even watch in. There's any work, except for the weather, and I can. I believe half of that. 

Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, it's sad I've had a a a sheriff on. it'll probably be just a few episodes before, before this one that we're recording today, and he talks about how that stuff plays a role in society, that showing this, these type of things, writing or showing or downplaying things and stuff like that perpetuates other situations throughout the country. So they think, one bad cop in wherever is now every bad cop and every single position throughout the country. I mean, you're right, we do not like other. You know we don't like bad officers, right, we don't want them in the workforce. But some of them stay in there longer than they should, some of them get weeded out and it's unfortunate, but it does perpetuate situations. 

Speaker 1: You know the media does in negative, negative light for sure, which is detrimental to everybody. But there's also something to be said about there. There are people who make legitimate mistakes. That are police firemen, doctors, medics, whatever. People make mistakes And I get, we don't want to make mistakes with people's lives. But how many other practicing well this things in life, right, that make life and death decisions? how many times did they make mistakes and get called out for it? 

Speaker 2: Exactly, and that's the thing, especially in news media. I just believe that they think we're robots, they think that we have to do stuff a certain way or and we're infallible. But that's far from the truth. And in the book I wrote it I talked about how our brains work And I talked about how the stress, the shoot, the don't shoot, the stress and what is it the fight or slight syndrome and everything and why we go through that. And There's a study, several studies done that when we see things visually, our vision is probably the best of our senses. 

Speaker 2: When we see things, it usually takes about 200 milliseconds to process that 200 to 300. A blink of an eye is about 200 to 300 milliseconds. In the book I put out this scenario of you're a police officer. You get a call of a suspicious person and he possibly has a gun. You get there and you see that the dude does have a gun and you go into full stress mode and all of these physiological things are happening to your body. Everybody always has seconds or 30 seconds. It's milliseconds. It takes 200 to 300 milliseconds to notice that the guy has a gun. Then your body starts doing all this stuff. You get prepared for whatever you do, you take out your weapon, you're yelling at the guy to comply. All of that happens in milliseconds. If you wait more than two or three seconds, then something bad is going to happen. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a Sorry. Things do process really fast, but you're not only just processing your body and what you need to do in those milliseconds, but aren't you also processing what the subject is doing in those milliseconds, plus your background, right, because you're accounted for every bullet? So all of those things in those milliseconds? 

Speaker 2: And the newsman thinks, oh, why did? he didn't have to shoot, i had less than a second to think all about this and to do this. And what you do in one second is going to be through the court system and through the naysayers for years. So that's something that's hard to. It's a hard pill to swallow sometimes, and that had been an incidence where we did stuff and then five years later you're sitting in federal court getting sued. Fortunately it was a defendants verdict so we were found not liable for our actions. But that's just the craziness of the job. And Excuse me for a second, yeah, okay, yeah, that's just the craziness of the job and how we have to do things. 

Speaker 1: Right, and so all these things that we go through on the job play out in our brains right, right. 

Speaker 2: You know, what happens is after that incident okay, that incident, we'll say, took It probably took 10 minutes to wrap up You get the bad guy, he goes to jail. You book him. As soon as the threat's over, your body starts releasing hormones to counteract the hormones that were produced to handle the stress. So now you're all amped up, your blood pressure's up, your heart rate is going on a mile a minute And all of a sudden now everything has to come back down, but unfortunately in the first responder arena you don't come back down. A half an hour later you should be down, back down to your normal self, but you're not, because you're constantly going up and down this ladder going. 

Speaker 2: You get back, you get another hot call or something else happens, and so you're spending your entire eight to 12-hour shift at a high sense of hypervigilance or a high sense of stress or danger, and that just It's not good on It causes. Our bodies are basically one big electrical bomb. The signals that we send through our neurological system is electric And we know, because we own houses, that electricity fails. Sometimes they short-circuit, and that's what happens in our bodies. So it's not. We weren't designed to handle the amount of stress that we're handling these days. 

Speaker 1: Yeah. 

Speaker 2: I agree with you And that's what's really hurting us and that's where you start in a short circuit. There's a guy named Dr or Kevin Gilmorton. He's a retired Pima County, tucson area sheriff And he also has a PhD in clinical psychology and wrote a book about hypervigilance and this cycle and how cops think about people and how we go up and down. You go to work, you're on a high sense of alertness all day long, then you come home and you don't come back down. A lot of guys they'll fall into the alcohol trap and start drinking to calm down. That doesn't help And then by the time you finally come back down, you become a couch potato because when you're all amped up you're going to flip and then you're just going to be sitting there watching TV, drinking and doing silly stuff and not eating right, and so you have to break out of that every day. And that all gets back to the discipline of what you learned in the academy about diet and physical fitness and stuff. 

Speaker 2: I'm not the most physical fit guy in the world right now, but it all plays out. You have to keep your mind. And one thing in our arena is cops don't associate with other people other than cops, firefighters are the same way. Firefighters' friends follow firefighters. Firefighters and cops do things together. They don't go outside and have a normal civilian friend because for the most part people wouldn't understand us and they think we have a sixth sense of humor. But that's also damaging to our brains because all we're doing is talking around being around cops or firefighters all the time And you got to get out and see what the other world's about and get your brain thinking about other stuff than cop or firefighter stuff. 

Speaker 1: So yeah, I like that. 

Speaker 2: It's interesting, my mouse took a dump. 

Speaker 1: You're good, so I mean so we know, you know this hypervigilance or physical health or dieting, these things affect our brain. But, danny, how can we prevent first responders from taking their own lives? What can we do? 

Speaker 2: Education. First of all, we have to stop the stigma. Just get rid of it, And stigma is basically defined as a markishame or discredit. We have to get rid of that And that's going to start at the top. That's the administrators and the administration's job. The other thing we have to do is we have to change the culture. You know the culture right now is. You do this because that's the way we've always done it. And once we change the culture and get better educated, we can overcome it. You know the culture basically is in the mental health of brain, is. It's a sign of weakness And I already mentioned that That's what I thought it was. It was a sign of weakness, of failure. And once there's a dictionary, they describe culture as a set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterize an institutional organization. And by changing the culture of the organization, that will help. 

Speaker 2: One of the things that first responders don't do and why they don't get help is because they don't trust the agencies they work for. You know you don't trust the psychologists that the agency sends you to. You don't trust your bosses, that you don't want them to know that you're hurting, because you know a lot of people feel that they can lose their careers or they can be demoted on the police officer side, And especially the retired police officer side, by letting the department know that you have a mental illness or your suicidal and stuff. That's pretty good ticket to get your concealed weapons pulled and getting your badge taken away from you And you don't really want that to happen. So the departments have to open up and see deal with it in a different way. 

Speaker 2: And the department I come came from Los Angeles Sheriff's. Like I said, they had a, they have a psychological services unit And I was talking to a surgeon a couple about a month ago. He's still on the job. He's a separated marine. He was deployed several times to Iraq and Afghanistan And he had issues when he came back And he finally kind of just said I got to do this, He wasn't got help from the department And they have been very supportive of him. 

Speaker 2: So I'm kind of hoping that the department I worked for is changing their culture or their attitudes on PTSD And if they do, then that can lead other departments to do it. It's a slow process. We all know that in government everything takes a years to get done, But it's by you having this podcast, me talking about it, writing about it. You know where. There's numerous people talking about it. If we keep doing this and getting awareness out there, that can help change everything and get people to understand that if you need help, get help And there's organizations out there where you can, So you don't have to go to your. 

Speaker 2: You don't have to go to your own department. You know a lot of some of the issues and I hope they change. And this is going to be should be done at the national level And probably hopefully done at the state level is a lot of jurisdictions. if they send you to a psychologist or psychiatrist that they're paying for the patient. Dr privilege is not in effect. So therefore, if my boss sent me to a psychologist today, they could call up tomorrow and say Hey, what? What did Danny talk about to you? about What's what's his issues? Is he safe to come back to work? And that's why we don't trust him, because your bosses can get their fingers in it And you know, like I said, the administrators. They have other issues to deal with. They don't want to deal with with our issues. 

Speaker 1: So yeah, i can speak to not personally why they don't trust them, but I've had a number of conversations, guests and phone calls about why they don't trust them. And I'm going to go back to one thing. You said leadership That's. That's a huge one, right? They tell you that you're seek help if you need help, but then when you do, you're not treated the same. When you come back, it's not like a physical injury, right, that they can see, that they can either you come back from and see how you're performing. 

Speaker 1: You know, a mental health issue is a little bit different. So leadership, leadership is definitely one. I get reason. You know there's a stigma, because if I'm going to lose my job over something like this, why would I go help myself? And it takes very few courageous people to do that, especially if they know that the therapist is not culturally competent Or in, according to you, the department can find out what they're talking about. If we can't change those things, we can talk about this a lot, but there's going to have to be some major changes take place, as in probably rules and regulations on how departments are running their mental health programs. 

Speaker 2: That's correct And it's got to be done at the national level. There was a study a couple of years ago by the University of Phoenix And in the study I forgot how many a thousand or 2,000 first responders they talked to 57% fear negative repercussions when they talked about their mental health to their bosses. And you know over half of the people at your agency don't want to talk to the bosses about it because they think they're going to get negative repercussions and 40% fear of being demoted or fired. That's just not how. It shouldn't be that way. It's got to be different. 

Speaker 1: What about even this? What about you? go to them and they don't even listen. 

Speaker 2: You could walk in with a broken leg and take in a cast and they wouldn't listen to you. 

Speaker 1: Sadly, that might be true in some places, but I mean, there are. You know, there's other concerns, right? There's other department members, there's other concerns, there's citizen concerns. There's all these concerns And I don't have time to listen. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, it's. 

Speaker 1: I find by going and go ahead, No continue. 

Speaker 2: Yeah, i find talking to other people outside of the agency or just talking to my peers going out and saying, hey, this is, this is what's going on. You know, i have my back to take care of me, watch over me, and stuff That's that's more helpful than going to your bus because, you're right, they don't want to listen, they've got too many other issues going on, so, fortunately there's other. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, fortunately, this other program is being put into place where you don't have to go to your boss or you don't have to do things that are a lot more discreet, and I think that will help, right, that's one way that you can fight the stigma is by going doing things privately and without having anyone know about it. 

Speaker 2: There's a one of the blogger wrote talked about when you go to the department psychologist. Like I said, I was involved in a couple of incidents where shots were fired and suspect was killed, So we had to all of us had to go to the psychologist and talk to them. And it's when you go in there. You'll walk in, you talk to the guy for a couple of seconds and he say I'm okay, I'm great, Never felt better, See you later. And then you go home and you drink a 12 packet beer and you cry and you just have a hard time getting over what you did And that's not the way it does. But then when you turn around and you can research and has shown that peer counseling but just by talking to a trained peer counselor by train deputy or police officer, firefighter that can understand it, by talking to them, that helps out a lot And that's more, a lot of times more helpful than going to the psychologist, especially because you're going to lie to them anyway. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, and the beauty about peer support is support, empower and connect. That's your job, three main jobs as a peer supporter. And that supporting, empowering, connecting can look a lot of different ways But you know, also could look as, hey, let's get you to the right therapist. You know I know somebody good. Or in a peer support group we've had people go and let's get you to somebody that we think may be good for you. But you know I always going to want to bring this up about therapists. I work with one very closely and another business I have. But you know, culturally competent peer therapists, or, excuse me, culturally competent therapists, are amazing. It's the ones that are not culturally competent that people go to more often than not that struggle with that, that struggle with therapists. But therapy is like a kind of like a dating process. You got to go to different ones sometimes to find the right one that matches you. You know some people like Ford, some people like Chevy's, because of different reasons, but therapists are just buying the one. That's your person. 

Speaker 2: And it's kind of weird as we're working at their psychologists didn't stick around one. They would come in. It was almost like a training ground. For a year and a half or two years They'd come in, they'd be there and then they were gone. And so you're getting new people all the time and that gets into what you call culturally competent. Culturally competent And because they're not, they're just they're in their learning phase still and that's hard to deal with. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, can you imagine, though, potentially being a therapist at one of these agencies, let's say the one that you came from, of what thousands of members, right officers, and you're one of the few therapists And you hear what takes place every day, you know, in, let's say, the county of LA and stuff like that, from all these different officers? Can you imagine what that would be like You have to have as a therapist right? You got to have your own, probably therapist, plus your own you know programs to make sure you're doing to keep yourself, you know helping yourself right. 

Speaker 2: That's true, and I've read articles about that in the past And it's like, yeah, you definitely need, as a therapist, to keep your mind clear and do different stuff. 

Speaker 1: So it's yeah, Danny. before we wrap this up, I want to talk about two things we haven't really touched on. You have a book, and then you have also a website, So let's first briefly talk about your book. 

Speaker 2: Okay, i wrote a book. It's on Kindle right now and hopefully it'll be in paperback by the end of police week, which is next week, or. Yeah, it's next week May 15th, May 16th. 

Speaker 1: May 15th Yeah. 

Speaker 2: It should be in paperback and it's on Amazon. The book is called broken BRO with a semicolon and then KEN, and the purpose of the semicolon is is authors will use a semicolon as a pausing point instead of a period, whereas you pause it instead of end it. Well, the mental health field The semicolon is a symbol of your pausing instead of going on with committing suicide or dying by suicide. So that's, that's a. It's a basically an international symbol. There's a lot of people have little tattoos of a semicolon on their wages, letting people know that that there's there's issues there and they've gotten through those issues. 

Speaker 2: The book is about the why. It starts off with how we're wired power, brains work and I brought up a little bit on that, and it just goes through that we talk. I talk about stress, the different types of stress and how it affects your body, suppressing your emotions and just burning stuff so deep inside you you can't get through it. So, and why not to do that? I talk about sleep and sleep deprivation, alcohol abuse And the entire book. It is a faith Facebook, and so there is scripture in it, because and then at the very end, is an article of why we need to be, have a relationship with our creator And because, you know, i didn't get through my career just because I'm a smart guy and lucky. I got my career because I had a guardian angel sitting on my shoulder telling me Hey, stupid, turn left instead of right. And you know, because if I turn right I would have cut a bullet or cut something. And that's what it's about. It's. I think it's. 

Speaker 2: It's a pretty good book. I've gotten a lot of people told me that it's. It's excellent written and and it puts out a lot of material and in the book. So then I have the website. It is called bulletprooffirstrespondercom, it's one word And it's a blog monthly And I write about different issues and some of the issues is the same with what I wrote about in the book. I have written some leadership issues. I've written some personal stories about some issues that other people have gone to. One of them is a Los Angeles City firefighter who fell through a roof and just about died And he, his story was really good, so I wrote about that. I blog and if you go to the website, i believe you can sign up so I can send you an email every month or when the blog's coming out And, like I said, i try to get one out of every month, and that's again bulletprooffirstrespondercom Awesome. 

Speaker 1: Danny. So I've got a new new format for for the podcast and a new blog. I've been testing it out here and I'm going to I'm going to throw this question out to you, danny what's what is your? we talked about kind of like what's your why behind, why you're doing all this, but I want to know what can you tell the audience, the listeners, like what? what can you tell them to so they can take action in their own lives to make some changes, to make some changes? 

Speaker 2: They have to be aware of their feelings, be aware of their emotions. Don't be afraid to talk to people about what's going on inside your head. Just get out and and do something. get out, meet different people, get a relationship with our creator and just continue to focus on what's right And get start processing the garbage out. Then you're getting the positive stuff inside your brain and you can just. it's just. it's kind of hard to hard to describe Changing cameras real quick here. Here we go. 

Speaker 2: But it's a you, just. You just need to be aware of what's going on and be aware of your emotions. 

Speaker 1: Yeah, and and how would you suggest that we we can become more aware of our emotions? 

Speaker 2: I'm quite sure Just a You got to dig deep down inside yourself. You have to take a real good look at yourself and so you can get to understand what's going on. If you're not a friend of yourself, then there's more issues than you need to get help. Just look deep down inside yourself every day. When you get up in the morning and you're having a cup of coffee, think about what the day before was and what issues you had and how you can deal with them better this day. 

Speaker 2: A friend of mine he is a co, i can't even think of the word. He was one of the people that started an organization called Mighty Oaks, an organization that deals with military, veteran and first responder mental health issues, and co-founder. He has a saying called March or Die. He got that from when he was deployed in a rock. His thing is you can stay in one place and die or you can put one foot forward in front of the other and move forward. Just taking a good look at yourself every day and decide, making the mental decision to say I'm not going to sit here and die, i'm going to move forward. You're not going to physically die, but you're emotionally dying and you're just causing more pain to yourself. That's about the best way I can say just keep moving forward, clean your brain out and march instead of dying. 

Speaker 1: What about this? I've thought about this in your book. Wouldn't be some of the way you process things, and stuff like that Is, for you, your faith-based, your scriptures? reading your scriptures, does that spark something in you and believing that there's a higher power to help find yourself each day? Yes, it does. 

Speaker 2: One of the things that my wife can do is, every morning we'll go through, we'll read scripture, read devotionals and talk about what we read, and then I'm constantly in prayer just thanking God for what He's given me. I do more thanking than I do asking, which probably is a good thing, i guess, but it has helped a lot. That's one way that I get the garbage out is by filling my head with positiveness and filling my head with the word of God. It's worked for me and it's worked for a lot of people. 

Speaker 1: Right Going back to, I think, being grateful and the gratitude that you're giving. A lot of thanks. I think that's incredibly important in our lives to be constantly giving of ourselves and be grateful for what we have. But, like you said, we also have to ask. We have to ask to receive. In almost anything we do in life, we have to ask to receive. 

Speaker 2: That's correct. 

Speaker 1: That may be your higher power or God or whatever you believe in, or asking someone else, but sometimes you have to ask, which can take a lot of courage to do. 

Speaker 2: That it does, i ask today. I asked to do a good job on this podcast. I asked for wisdom a lot because of the different things I do It just wisdom and to keep focused on the mission The mission I'm on right now. I wrote it down that I was inspired by God to do this to write blogs, to write the book, to go on podcasts. I was on a podcast about a year and a half a year ago and they told me I had a lot of courage to write a blog. I go, you guys have a lot of courage to film a podcast or record a podcast, but they were firefighters, so I get it, yeah. 

Speaker 1: Well, Danny, thank you so much for being on today And thank you for accepting this mission to spread all the good word about stomping out the stigmatism and not just doing a blog where you have a website and the book called Broken. So please check out Danny's website and his book and follow Danny on social media as well. 

Speaker 2: And can I throw out a couple of phone numbers real quick? Yeah, please do, if you're a first responder and you have suicidal ideation. There are actually several organizations, but there are two great organizations. One is for cops and cops family, for law enforcement. It's called Copline And they are a group of retired and trained police officers that you can talk to. They're 24 seven. Their phone number is 800 copline or 800 to 675463. And the other one is for firefighters and medics. It's the fire EMS helpline And again, they're. They're trained people to talk to if you have suicidal ideation and their phone number is 800 731 fire or 800 731 3473. And those, those two, they're 24 seven. It's confidential And I believe they do a good job on what they do. I have friends that volunteer for both of those organizations. 

Speaker 1: Great, thank you for doing that. I really appreciate that. Well, thank you, danny, so much for being on the podcast today. 

Speaker 2: Thank you, jerry, for having me, so I've been humbled and appreciated. Thanks again day.