By Paul Gullon-Scott, Forensic Mental Health & Well-being Lead, Spectrum Specialist Consultancy Ltd
This year I attended Forensics Europe Expo at Olympia London. I went with a fairly simple aim: to talk to as many digital forensic investigators (DFIs) as I could about the mental health stressors they face, and to get a feel for what support actually looks like on the ground, not on paper. What I came away with was something closer to concern than reassurance.
A pattern emerged almost immediately, and it repeated itself in conversation after conversation, with investigators from different forces, different units, different parts of the country. Psychometric measures are emailed out. The investigator completes them, alone, usually at their own desk, often between exhibits. Sometime later, an email arrives telling them whether they have been assessed as fit to carry out their role, or not fit to carry out their role. That is the whole interaction. No conversation. No clinician in the room. No one watching how they respond as they answer the questions, no one able to notice the pause before a difficult item, the shift in tone, the thing that doesn’t get captured by a Likert scale but which any trained eye would catch in seconds.
I have to be honest about my reaction to hearing this described, over and over, by different people who had no reason to compare notes with each other beforehand: I was shocked. Not because I doubted psychometrics have a role, they clearly do, and I use them extensively in my own research and clinical work. I was shocked because of what has been stripped away around them. A psychometric score was never meant to be the whole assessment. It was meant to be a starting point for a conversation, a shared piece of data that a clinician and a person sit with together and make sense of. What I was hearing described was the scaffolding being mistaken for the building.
What’s Missing Is the Relationship
Two things stood out to me as being genuinely absent from the process these investigators described, and I think they are connected.
The first is clinical judgement at the point of completion. A trained therapist administering something like the PCL-5 or the GAD-7 face to face isn’t just collecting a number. They’re watching for mismatch between what’s being reported and how it’s being reported. They’re able to ask a follow-up question when an answer seems to undersell or overstate distress. They’re able to make a genuinely informed decision about fitness for role, one that accounts for context, not just a cut-off score. None of that is possible over email. A threshold is either crossed, or it isn’t, and a decision gets made by a system rather than a person.
The second, and I think this one matters just as much, is the complete absence of feedback on where someone actually sits. Nobody was being told, “here is your score on this measure, here is what that means clinically, here is where you sit relative to a normative range.” They were being told fit or not fit. That’s it. Binary. Which means an investigator has no way of tracking their own trajectory over time. They can’t notice they’ve been drifting upward on a trauma symptom measure over six months. They can’t use their own psychometric history as an early warning system, because they’re never shown it. The tool that should be handing them insight into their own well-being is instead being used purely as a gatekeeping mechanism, and the gate only opens one way, outward, toward a decision made about them rather than with them.
This is where the contrast with the British Psychological Society’s own practice guidance felt so stark to me. The BPS framework is explicit that good practice means a person-centred, collaborative approach, where practitioner and patient are co-creators of the care being delivered, not a paternalistic model where information flows one direction and a verdict flows back. The whole thrust of that guidance is toward partnerships that build a person’s self-efficacy and active participation in understanding their own psychological state. What I was hearing described at the Expo is close to the inverse of that. Its assessment done to someone, at a distance, with the person on the receiving end of a decision they had no real part in shaping and no visibility into.
I don’t say this to criticise the individual clinicians or occupational health teams who may be operating within systems that were never resourced properly in the first place. I suspect much of this is a resourcing and commissioning problem dressed up as an assessment protocol. But the effect on the investigator is the same regardless of the cause: they are left more exposed, not less, by a process that was ostensibly built to protect them.
Six Sessions Against Years of Accumulation
The second theme that came up repeatedly, and which sat with me on the train home, was the therapy allocation. A number of the DFIs I spoke to had used their full entitlement of six sessions and been told, when they asked for more, that the entitlement was exhausted. Six sessions!!
I want to sit with that number for a moment, because I think it deserves scrutiny rather than passing mention. Six sessions is a figure that makes a kind of administrative sense for acute, single-incident distress. It does not make clinical sense as a response to cumulative, repeated exposure to some of the most disturbing material that exists, sustained across years, often across an entire career. This isn’t a population presenting with a single traumatic event to process. In the research I’ve been involved with through Forensic Focus, the Forensic Focus Well-Being Study 2026, we are seeing exactly the pattern you’d expect from that kind of sustained exposure: elevated rates of probable PTSD, meaningful associations between early life adversity and later trauma symptomatology, and critically, that the quality of supervision investigators receive moderates how much that exposure translates into psychological harm. Supervision quality matters because good supervision is ongoing, relational, and responsive to fluctuation over time. Six sessions, arbitrarily capped, is none of those things.
There’s a mismatch here that I think is worth naming openly. The organisations doing this work are, in many cases, aware that the population they employ carries elevated psychological risk. They screen for it. They have occupational health pathways. What they don’t seem to have, at least not from what I heard, is a therapeutic offer that’s been scaled to match the nature of the harm. A trauma load built up over a decade, as it was in my own case, through CSAM review, homicide exhibits, or digital evidence from atrocity investigations is not going to resolve within six sessions. Telling someone that their entitlement has run out communicates something corrosive: that their distress has an administrative ceiling, regardless of whether the distress itself does.
What I Take From This
I came away from the Expo more convinced than ever that the gap here isn’t a lack of awareness. Every investigator I spoke to knew, in detail, what wasn’t working for them. The gap is between recognising a population is at risk and actually building a support structure that matches the shape of that risk, one that’s collaborative rather than transactional, and that scales with cumulative exposure rather than treating every case as a single acute event.
None of this is a reason for despair. If anything, hearing it said so consistently, by people who had never met each other, is useful data in its own right. It tells me the problem is systemic rather than local, which means it’s addressable at the level of policy and commissioning rather than something that has to be fought ward by ward, force by force or company by company. That’s the work Forensic Focus and the Forensic Focus Well-Being Study 2026 findings are aimed at, translating what practitioners already know from lived experience into evidence that’s hard to set aside.
I want to end this piece with a thank you, because it matters more than anything analytical I’ve written above.
To every single DFI who took the time to come and speak with me at the Expo, thank you. You were generous with things that aren’t easy to talk about, in the middle of a busy expo floor, to someone you’d never met. That candour is the raw material this whole field of work depends on, and I don’t take it lightly that so many of you chose to share.
I’ll be back next year. And I intend to apply to speak at the Expo myself, because conversations like the ones I had shouldn’t only happen informally, in passing, between exhibition stands. This deserves a major platform. It’s time this issue was raised a level.
Paul Gullon-Scott BSc MA MSc MSc FMBPSS is a former Digital Forensic Investigator with nearly 30 years of service at Northumbria Police in the UK, specializing in child abuse cases. As a recognized expert on the mental health impacts of digital forensic work, Paul now works as a Higher Assistant Psychologist at Roseberry Park Hospital in Middlesbrough and is the developer of a pioneering well-being framework to support digital forensics investigators facing job-related stress. He recently published the research paper “UK-based Digital Forensic Investigators and the Impact of Exposure to Traumatic Material” and has chosen to collaborate with Forensic Focus in order to raise awareness of the mental health effects associated with digital forensics. Paul can be contacted in confidence via LinkedIn.
