The following transcript was generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Paul: Hello, and welcome back to the Forensic Focus Podcast. Joining me tonight is Phil Anderson from Northumbria University, both my friend and colleague. Phil and I have been working together, along with Dr Sarah Allen, on the Forensic Focus International Well-Being Study, and we’re here to continue our discussion of the findings.
We’re going to start with the mental health outcomes that came out of the data. This is very much my territory, and I want to go through it carefully, because several of these findings are clinically serious.
Phil: They deserve more than a headline. This is obviously the key point of the whole study, isn’t it — to look at and understand what’s actually happening to people. It’s the mental health, but it’s also the physical knock-on effect of the mental health issues.
Paul: Absolutely. Starting with PTSD symptoms measured by the PCL-5, the most prevalent presentation within the subdomains was hypervigilance: 47% of our population reported it at a moderate level or above. 45% reported difficulty sleeping, 44% reported difficulty concentrating, and another 44% reported difficulties with emotional detachment.
Intrusive thoughts — thoughts about what digital forensic investigators have been dealing with at work — came in at 43%. These aren’t marginal findings. Across a sample of 179 people, we’re talking about nearly half reporting hypervigilance and sleep disturbance at clinically meaningful levels. What do you make of that?
Phil: It’s frightening, isn’t it? Not to belittle the figures, but put it this way: it’s every other one. It’s every other one. 47% reporting hypervigilance. I know we’re going to do more analysis on this, and it’s good that one of the papers we’re going to write will focus on it.
I’ve come into this and — you’ve got the whole broad spectrum for this study. You’ve got the mental health subject expertise, you’ve also got the DFI experience. Coming into it, I think I’ve just been obscenely naive. I knew it was bad, but it was picked up after the last podcast about the self-harm and the suicide rates, and you think, yes, it can get bad, but not to that extent.
It’s a similar headline figure where you think, “Holy cow, this is serious” — and I don’t know if we can have another level above serious. It’ll be interesting when we do the analysis. When people say, “I’m hypervigilant” — I have a sneaky suspicion, and you’ll be able to go through this in more detail with more experience, but I’d suspect these aren’t standalone individual issues for one person.
I’d suspect they’ve got hypervigilance, and a lot of them have still got difficulty sleeping, and a lot of them have got difficulty concentrating. They’re not suffering from one particular issue. Every other one is suffering from four or five issues at the same time. On their own they’re very difficult to manage. If you’re trying to deal with intrusive thoughts, it’s the perfect vicious circle.
That goes back to the main reason we got on our bandwagon: we don’t want to see people go through this. We’re not going to fix it overnight — I’m not silly enough to think that. But even if it’s just to raise awareness. People who are in this job would potentially just like somebody to put a hand on their shoulder and say, “Thanks for telling us. Thanks for asking.”
People go in day in and day out and do this, but you’ve got to think that at some point people can’t do it anymore. They’re going to wake up one morning and think, “I physically can’t do this anymore.” And that’s somebody’s career — something they first started full of enthusiasm, did for the right reasons, wanted to make a difference — and then it’s taken away from them.
Paul: It is. And you touched on a really important point there: the comorbidity of the symptoms being reported. People aren’t experiencing these difficulties in isolation. Quite often they’re comorbid, so they’re experiencing more than one. If you have an individual suffering from hypervigilance, sleep disturbance and intrusive memories, what effect is that going to have on their performance?
Phil: And we’ve got to take it a step further. What impact is it having on their home life? Yes, we’re talking about DFIs, but there are other careers and other jobs out there with similar issues. That’s not our problem to solve — we want to work on this one.
But if you’re telling me somebody’s got difficulty concentrating at work, emotional detachment and, particularly, intrusive memories — have they got anybody to talk to at home? Do they want to talk to anybody at home? Are they married? Have they got a partner? Have they got a family? It’s going to affect them and everybody around them.
Paul: You’re right, it absolutely is. How do you go home and talk about it? How do you sit down over dinner and say to your wife, “These are the things I’ve been looking at today. I’ve had a really tough day”? How do you do that?
Phil: You can’t. I don’t think you can, unless your wife or your partner is in a similar career, because then they’d probably understand. That’s why it’s so important that we try to get support — a framework, a strategy, whatever it may be — in place to reduce the impact at work, and to reduce the impact people are then taking home with them.
Paul: Absolutely. And you’re right about those signs and symptoms following them home. Investigators have described experiencing short tempers at home, withdrawing from partners and friends, and imagery they’d seen at work appearing in their dreams. One person described it as: once seen, it can’t be unseen. I think that sums it up rather beautifully.
Phil: If I can jump in here, we’ve got to put this into context. We’re not talking about one scene, one image, one video. How many images and videos are investigators dealing with on a case-by-case basis? People need to understand it’s not just one job with one bad image in it that they can’t unsee.
Most of the jobs — and we know the statistics — the vast majority of DFI jobs are dealing with child sexual abuse material. There are hundreds, hundreds and thousands, tens of thousands in some cases. I genuinely don’t know it; I’ve had nothing to do with it, and thankfully I’m glad I haven’t.
But when you look at how many DFIs globally go through this on a day-to-day basis — and some of them, credit where it’s due, still get up and go and do the job in the morning knowing full well they’re going to walk into the office and see something that’s going to change their life forever.
Paul: That’s a really important point, because people outside of digital forensics might genuinely believe it’s only one or two images, when in fact the reality is it’s hundreds, often thousands, quite often tens of thousands of images. And that’s per case. That’s not annually — that’s per case.
Phil: I know there’s technology in place to try to reduce that. The likes of the CAID database help do that. But this links back to our previous conversation around AI, where you’ve got a flood of new material coming in that hasn’t potentially been classified or graded yet, so somebody’s going to have to do it.
Paul: Absolutely. Another quote that really stood out for me in the study was, “Nightmares don’t care about AI.” The meaning behind that is that the trauma response can’t distinguish between synthetic and real CSAM. The nervous system doesn’t read metadata. It doesn’t distinguish between the two — it will react in the same way.
Phil: One or two individuals raised a valid point on this. Our focus is on DFIs, and predominantly the people who have done this will be talking about CSAM. But you’ve obviously also got horrific images of beheadings and other extreme violent acts, and videos of extreme violent acts, and those will have a lasting effect on individuals.
Most people use mobile phones, most people use the internet, so it’s electronic material a DFI is going to have to pull off phones and do whatever needs to be done with so the investigation can continue. So yes, the focus is on CSAM, but it was a point well raised by somebody who completed the survey that there are other things out there as well.
Paul: Absolutely. Now, I think we need to spend some time on what I personally consider the most clinically significant finding in this entire study, and I think you know what we’re going to talk about. The PHQ-9 is a nine-item psychometric, and when Phil and I first ran the analysis and saw the numbers, we just couldn’t believe what we were looking at, could we?
Phil: No. And again — was I being naive? I knew there’d be something, but not to the level that it is. We don’t live in a perfect world. Everybody’s got their own challenges, everybody’s got their own demons, so to speak. But this is a job that they want to do, and it’s causing these problems.
It’s awful to think that people — and we’re talking particularly about DFIs, but in any walk of life — for somebody to go to work and then that work causes them to have the thoughts you’re about to talk about, I think that’s just not right. It’s just not right.
Paul: No. For those who don’t know what the PHQ-9 is, it measures depression, but there are some very specific questions in there, and it asks about thoughts of being better off dead or of hurting oneself. In the general working population, endorsement of that item at any frequency above “not at all” typically sits below 5%. Please hold that in mind.
In our sample, 13% — that is 24 people — reported these thoughts on several days in the past two weeks. 13%. That’s more than twice the national average.
Phil: Let’s go for nearly three times.
Paul: Yeah, it is. It’s nearly three times. 5%, nine people, reported those feelings on more than half the days within the last two weeks. And 2%, so three people, reported having those feelings nearly every single day.
I’m lost for words. When you talk about statistics like that, and then you consider the current mental health support — and I use that term loosely — which is available to DFIs, it is staggering.
In total, 20%, so one in five digital forensic investigators, are experiencing active suicidal or self-harm ideation at a clinically significant level. That’s four times the estimated general workforce population.
Phil: Just to put into context what these people are dealing with: we also asked them in the survey whether they thought they would leave in the next month, six months, twelve months, or whatever it may be — and not many people would consider leaving. It’s one of these jobs where people join because they want to make a difference.
I touched on it a little earlier, but to put people through that — this has got to be a wake-up call. We talk about the mental health support that’s put in place. You know more about this than me, Paul, so please jump in, but it’s obviously not working. I don’t want to be disrespectful to any organisation or any individual — they’re probably trying their best with whatever resources they can get — but it’s simply not enough.
Saying “I’ll throw whatever I can at it” isn’t enough. People need to take a step back and think, “Whatever we’re doing isn’t working. We’re going to have to accept we need to make a change here.” The on-call arrangements, whatever we’ve got — and again, I’m trying not to be disrespectful to any organisation — but from your experience, there’s been support on offer for years. It’s not a new thing.
People have got different experiences of what level of support they’re provided. There are some good examples in the survey. There are some very bad examples in the survey of what little support people have been provided. Ultimately you’ve got to look back over this and think, “It’s not working.” If 20% of individuals are, at some point during a working week, thinking about doing serious harm to themselves, it should never get to that point.
Paul: It should never get to that point. No, it shouldn’t.
Phil: It’s a job.
Paul: It’s a job. And one of the things we know from the rest of the data in the study is how strong the stigma is around disclosure of mental health issues in this profession, and how real the fear of career consequences is.
Phil: It was an anonymous survey, and you would hope that gave people the opportunity to speak freely, but maybe they didn’t feel they could. That’s a worry in itself. You’ve got to think the figures could be — and probably are — slightly higher in some of those ratios.
As we’re going through this, it would be interesting to compare across different fields to see what mental health support organisations have got in place. If we look at the blue light services — paramedics, for example, or the fire service, if they go to a fatal RTC — are they on similar lines? What support is available for them? Is there a comparative analysis?
Are police organisations falling way behind? They haven’t got a bottomless money wallet to do this, and potentially if they did they would, but it’s got to come up the priority list. It really has.
Paul: It’s your workforce.
Phil: It’s your workforce. We’ve discussed this before. If your workforce goes off sick or leaves, you’re just in this perpetual problem of losing people, losing experienced people, recruiting, training them up, potentially losing them again. I often use this phrase: it’s just rinse and repeat.
Paul: It absolutely is.
Phil: The problem is still not getting solved. We’re not going to be able to solve the fundamental problem of the work they’ve got to do. That’s just the world as it is. But what we’ve got to do is look at ways to minimise it. That’s the key thing. We’ve got to try to minimise their exposure, their experience, and how it affects them — rather than pushing people through the same system, hoping somebody will stick, somebody will manage, and if somebody falls by the wayside and chooses to leave, well, we’ll just recruit again.
Paul: It’s basic chain analysis, isn’t it? Imagine a chain with big links. The first link is the recruitment of the DFI. The second link is the training of the DFI. The third link is exposure to CSAM. The fourth link is becoming mentally unwell because of the exposure they’ve suffered — not just from CSAM, but from operational work as well. And the fifth link is that they can’t do it anymore and they leave.
You’ve got to break that chain somewhere. And the only way to break that chain is to put adequate support somewhere in the middle.
Phil: I genuinely don’t think there’s anything else you can do but get that bit right, to minimise the impact on your DFIs. We know we can’t change what they’re going to investigate — we’ve already said that. We’ve got the staff, we’ve trained them up, and it’s a very expensive business to train them up.
Paul: Very.
Phil: And then it’s getting them up to speed. They’re going to do investigations, they’re going to write reports, so there’s a lot riding on it. I was baffled at the start, but it’s probably left me even more baffled that nobody seems to be taking this and doing something serious with it.
It’s taken us — it’s taken you, really. This study is there to support what we want to push, and it will. We already know it’s going to. We kind of knew the answers, but we didn’t think it would ever be this bad. It’s then using this to support and push for change.
Paul: It absolutely is. And when you take into consideration the stigma applied to help-seeking behaviour within the industry — I think that’s reflected in another of the results from the well-being study, which is that 61% of participants didn’t access support services in the last year.
Phil: That’s mad. It’s mad.
Paul: So when you consider the stigma around it, and the 61% of participants who didn’t access support services, and then throw in the 20% who are experiencing suicidal ideation — that’s frightening.
Phil: From an organisational perspective it might be, “Well, we’ve provided the service. If you don’t access it, what can we do?” But maybe it’s because of the stigma. That’s nothing new. They’re providing a service through work, and the worry is: if they go in and have that discussion, is it going to get back to work? Are they going to be taken off? Are they going to be moved? Is anybody going to think differently about them?
So potentially, let’s not lay this all on the organisation. Potentially we need to work with DFIs as well. I still lay quite a bit of it at the organisation’s door — I’m not going to walk away from that — but what we also need to do is recognise DFIs aren’t immune to this either. They need to pull their socks up and do something as well, because it’s their health, it’s their wellbeing, it’s their families.
But it’s the stigma you deal with, and that’s in any walk of life. It’s often very, very difficult, and it’s obviously different for every individual as well, isn’t it?
Paul: It absolutely is. But this all goes back to the argument I’ve made from day one, which is that mental health support should be mandatory, because then it takes away the stigma.
Phil: Absolutely.
Paul: If everyone is getting it, if everyone is expected to do it, then it takes away that stigma of, “I can’t look for help because I’ll be thought of as weak.”
Phil: It’s nuts. It’s interesting — quite a few police organisations do mandatory random drug tests every now and again for staff, but they don’t do mandatory mental health support for staff. Just saying.
Paul: That’s a very good point. Listen, that is a very good point.
Phil: I don’t think we should go down that rabbit hole, otherwise we’ll never finish. Ultimately, what I’m saying is: where is it on the priority list?
Paul: Exactly. It doesn’t seem to appear anywhere, does it? That’s what I’m trying to say.
Phil: And rightly so — I’m not discrediting random drug and alcohol tests, because they need to be in place as well. But police organisations have made them mandatory because of how important they are. What police organisations need to do is think, right: mandatory mental health support is important. It’s mandatory. You will go. And then everybody has to go.
Paul: And then that changes the picture, doesn’t it?
Phil: Slowly and surely, it should.
Paul: So let’s move on to the physical health picture, and that adds yet another layer, doesn’t it? The PHQ-15, which we used in the well-being study, measures physical symptoms caused, the majority of the time, by mental health issues.
The data shows 41% of participants were bothered a lot by fatigue, 26% by trouble sleeping, and 23% by back pain. Some of the presentations suggested acute psychological stress responses. One investigator who’d been signed off for a month was still experiencing chest pains and a racing heart at the time they completed our survey.
The body doesn’t separate psychological distress from physical consequences. They are the same system.
Phil: I’m learning so much more about mental health and physical and psychological wellbeing ever since I got on board with you. But you’re right. I’ve been stressed at work — deadlines, pressure. Everybody gets it. But then you don’t sleep, you wake up exhausted, you can’t concentrate. It’s all fundamentally linked.
That goes back to the importance of getting the support right. We’ve talked about people being frightened to make mistakes and things like that. It’s a mentally and physically demanding job.
Paul: It is, and not a lot of people connect mental health problems with physical symptoms either.
Phil: I genuinely didn’t, until working with you and looking through the results of the survey and discussing them with you — the extent of the impact on the DFIs.
Paul: And obviously, if you’re receiving help for the mental health issues you might come up against, then it lowers the level of physical symptoms you experience and increases wellbeing in general. I’m not aware of any research papers that have been published looking at physical and mental health symptoms in digital forensics — but they’re coming.
Phil: My normal symptoms, if I’m stressed with work and deadlines, are that my body ends up getting run down and I get a cold. But this stuff is on a different level. And then to go back and do the same job, get up, go home, get up, come back, do the same job — there’s no relief. There’s no relief.
Paul: No, there isn’t.
Phil: In my job there are pinch points throughout the year where you’ve got tight deadlines, you’ve got to get things done, there’s a huge volume. There’s an old adage that everything just so happens to land at once, and there are certainly pinch points in the academic calendar where that’s very true. But let’s just say that’s a number of weeks out of an academic year.
We’ve got to remember that in their job — unless they’re taken out of rotation, or the rotation is managed based on what cases they do — there’s no, “I can see I just need to get my head down for a week or two, get through this, get it done.” There’s no light at the end of the tunnel for some of these. There’s no relief where they can turn round and say, “I’ll get this job out of the way, I’ll get these couple of jobs wrapped up, and then I’ll move on to the next one.” And the next one could be much worse.
Paul: Exactly. So there’s no respite at all, is there?
Phil: No. And I know there’s been discussion, and some implementation, about taking people off cases and trying to reduce the numbers. But bearing in mind the volume we’re talking about — Paul, you may know more about this — you’re talking 80, 85% CSAM material these days.
Paul: Oh, easily.
Phil: Easily. So although we talk about rotation, how can you rotate somebody onto a different case, or give them a different role within the organisation for a bit? That’s something we can’t fix. Nobody can fix it, unfortunately.
Paul: No. Such is the volume of CSAM going through the labs these days, it would be really difficult to do that.
Phil: It would be a nice fix if it was an option, but unfortunately I don’t see it as a viable long-term option.
Paul: It isn’t, and that’s why it’s so important to provide the right support.
Phil: Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to. You can’t avoid it, so you’re right.
Paul: So we’re going to move on to resilience. Resilience is a word I think is overused a lot, and it has in the past carried some quite negative connotations, when people who have tried to seek help for mental health symptoms have been told, “Well, you’re not resilient enough.”
That’s a hell of a negative connotation to make. It suggests that person isn’t strong enough to do the job, and that is absolutely not the case.
Phil: And that feeds back into the stigma issues as well, doesn’t it?
Paul: It does. And I want to be really clear that this is not a picture of people who are unable to cope, because that’s not the case. The resilience data in our study is genuinely encouraging. 66% of respondents said they bounce back quite quickly after hard times. 56% said recovery from a stressful event doesn’t take them very long. This is a really resilient workforce we’re talking about.
But resilience is not a fixed resource. It is built, maintained, and can easily be depleted over time. And the conditions we’ve been describing — chronic overload, no supervision, fear of speaking up — are exactly the conditions that will erode resilience over time. So the people who are still coping now may not be coping in twelve months if nothing changes.
Phil: No. And this is why it baffles me that the higher-ups in the organisation don’t look down and see this. They walk in and it’s, “How’s everybody doing?” And most people, straight-faced, say, “Oh yes, we’re fine, thank you very much.” It needs somebody to push that little bit more, just to find out how people are really coping.
People in the study have acknowledged that everybody develops their own coping strategy. Everybody’s slightly different. Everybody’s affected by similar things differently, which makes the scenario a bit more complex. I don’t know whether we should talk about resilience, or whether we should use the word tolerance as well.
Somebody under a high-pressure situation — there are only so many minutes, hours, days, weeks, months that person can cope with it. Some will do better than others, and eventually something’s going to happen. They’re going to have a breakdown. We know the statistics we just mentioned about suicidal ideation. Fundamentally, that’s the worst-case scenario.
You mentioned somebody who’d been off for a month and was still having chest pains and heart palpitations. That’s not right.
Paul: No job should be causing that.
Phil: Exactly. And I’m going to go back to something we’ve talked about. One of the first papers coming out of the study is going to be around the impact of AI CSAM material. The introduction of it has, I think, opened the door to a different set of potential coping strategies that came out in the survey.
When the questions asked them about it, a lot of them said, “Look, if I’m completely 100% sure this is AI, we’re not dealing with a real victim.” One person said — and I’m going to read the quote — that they packaged AI material as “not real, no real children harmed”, so they could process it better. But in the same breath they acknowledged that it’s increasingly hard to differentiate between one and the other. So eventually that coping strategy is just going to go out of the window.
Paul: Exactly. And of course AI is developing all the time. The more it develops, the more intelligent it becomes — well, I don’t like to use that word, actually.
Phil: In this context it’s horrible.
Paul: The more realistic the images and videos are going to become.
Phil: Yeah.
Paul: So that coping strategy goes out of the window.
Phil: It’s only going to last so long. In the DFI day-to-day job, I’d think coping strategies have probably only got a finite lifetime anyway, because of the constant pressure. In theory, if nothing changes, as a human being your brain is only going to be able to cope with so much for so long. You could maybe shift from one strategy to another down the line, but eventually it comes back to getting the right support. With that in place, these individual coping strategies will probably be a bit more robust.
Paul: Absolutely. Another finding we’ll move on to is around supervision and support. We look at these findings through a clinical lens, and frankly, they’re scandalous.
49% of respondents receive no clinical or psychological supervision whatsoever. So almost half of respondents don’t receive any supervision. None. Of those who do receive it — 51%, the majority — 74% rated it no better than adequate, and only 27% rated it good or excellent.
Phil: I would say they’re the lucky ones in all this.
Paul: In any other profession with equivalent exposure to traumatic material — social work, forensic nursing, trauma therapy — the absence of regular clinical supervision would be considered a serious professional and organisational failure. So why isn’t it considered that in digital forensics?
Phil: To be honest, I remember when we launched this survey, I was checking every five minutes to see how many people had responded. A couple of days in there was a handful — I think we were in early double figures — and this was the first section I went to, to find out what people had written. Because I knew this one, along with other things, was the important bit.
The survey lets us understand how bad it is to start with, but this area is one where we can try to do a lot of work and link back to other things to address the issues. Because like you say — 74% rated it no better than adequate.
Paul: That’s not good.
Phil: It’s not. And I’m not looking for excuses, but somebody’s got to hold their hand up. There are 179 people from around the world, so different organisations, different approaches. But fundamentally, if you went to your doctor and they said, “You need surgery — but don’t worry, the surgeon you’ve got is rated good or excellent by 27% of patients,” I’d be out the door, thank you very much.
Paul: Me as well. Who would want to see a GP rated that badly?
Phil: Exactly. And again, I don’t know — we want to make changes. Are we looking at a picture that’s significantly shifted in the last two, three, four, five years? No. I think this is a true reflection of what’s been going on for the past ten years, if not longer, easily. This challenge is not a new thing.
I also think — and I don’t think we captured this data — but in the world of the DFI, certainly in the UK, when I got involved in the early days you were a police officer, you were a DC. Then at some point they decided to civilianise all the posts. So you’ve got people coming in from various different backgrounds, with no police background — rightly or wrongly, that’s not a discussion we’re going to have here.
They may have subject expertise and subject knowledge around the processes and procedures. This one I was worried about, and I think the statistics and the results have supported it. I’m not shocked. I think I’m more disappointed. I’m more disappointed that it’s as bad as it is. I’m not shocked, though.
Paul: In the same vein, other findings from the study were around peer support. Peer support debriefs are almost non-existent: 54% of respondents had never participated in a peer debrief. We know from previous research that peer support within the digital forensic community has a massive effect in reducing the signs and symptoms of PTSD, anxiety, stress and so on. Yet in our study we found 54% of participants never had the opportunity to do it.
Phil: It would be interesting to know why. You’ve worked in this area, you’ve been a DFI investigator — is it simply that nobody wants to do it, nobody’s been trained to do it, or is it that nobody’s got time to do it? That’s the first thing that comes to mind.
Paul: I think there is a time factor, but when you consider the risks involved in the loss of workforce, I think you have to stop and make time for it.
To carry on in the same vein, a further 32% reported they were only occasionally offered a peer debrief after working on a difficult job. So when you combine the two, you’re talking about 86% of investigators having no meaningful access to peer debriefs or supervisory support after dealing with the material they’re dealing with. How is that right?
Phil: I honestly don’t know. I’m baffled. And again, it’s about trying to get underneath this — if we’re ever able to — to understand why that is. What’s the factor that’s stopping it? Is it individuals? Every organisation works slightly differently. They’ll do different things.
Going back to what we said, this is one of the areas where, certainly from my perspective, my main interest is in trying to make meaningful changes within supervision and within support. I know DFIs all work slightly differently, but I’m assuming a lot of them work in teams. They’ll be managed by somebody else within that team, and the hierarchy will go up that way.
One of my thoughts is that maybe those people don’t feel comfortable, or don’t feel sufficiently trained, to have a debrief with somebody, because it opens up a whole world of things they don’t know how to deal with or how to help with.
Paul: We did explore some of the barriers to formal support, and the results told their own story. 48%, as you’ve already mentioned, cited lack of time. So nearly half haven’t got the time to seek support. 37% cited confidentiality concerns — they’re worried that whatever they disclose will somehow be shared unnecessarily.
34% reported fears around the impact it would have on their careers. One participant described watching colleagues’ careers effectively end after they disclosed mental health difficulties. They said in the study, “Organisations tend to end your career.” Those were the words used by that DFI.
Phil: It’s insane. It’s utterly insane. You’re doing a job where you need help, and you’re frightened to get help because it’ll stop you doing the job you want to do — the job that’s why you joined.
Paul: It’s no wonder people are reluctant to seek help.
Phil: We’ve talked about this before, and it comes around again in these questions: people are scared to ask for help. Genuinely scared. You’ve mentioned that people have confidentiality concerns, and I’d think that would bleed into, “I’m worried in case I lose my job, I’m worried in case I get moved out of the job I really want to do into another job I didn’t join for.”
Within the police, DFI is a very niche area. I’d think a lot of people joined because they want to make a difference, so if they start to complain, or they’re struggling to cope, they’ll try to manage it themselves — and we’ve touched on that, that’ll only last so long.
Paul: It will. It doesn’t have an infinite lifespan, does it?
Phil: No. I’m terrible at analogies, but if you imagine a stick of dynamite with a fuse, the fuse is lit and you’re just watching it and watching it, and eventually it’ll reach the dynamite and it’ll go off.
But there are so many things you can put in place to better the work environment, the work methodology, the approach, everything. I genuinely think this is where there’s the opportunity to do the most work. But just to put it into context: you’ve got 20% of your workforce sitting there having suicidal thoughts, and they’re frightened to speak up.
Paul: It doesn’t bear thinking about.
Phil: No.
Paul: It really doesn’t. Phil, we haven’t got to the end of the results yet. What a shock.
Phil: We’re getting close, though, aren’t we?
Paul: We are, we’re getting closer. We still have neurodiversity in digital forensics, and the recommendations we’ve come up with from the study. So Phil, I’m going to ask if you’d like to come back again next month.
Phil: Twist my arm.
Paul: And let’s finish this off.
Phil: Certainly. I know neurodivergence is an interest of yours, and it was one of the big things for the survey. And most definitely we’ve got to talk about the recommendations.
Paul: Before we go, have you got anything else to pass on to those watching?
Phil: Don’t struggle alone. Genuinely, don’t struggle alone. I know it may feel like the walls are closing in, and I know it’s easy for me sitting here saying what I would do and what you should do — but please, reach out to somebody at work. Reach out to a close friend or somebody, even if it’s just to talk, just to unload. There’s the old saying that a problem shared is a problem halved.
I appreciate that given the subject matter, people will find it difficult to talk to colleagues, family or friends. But all I can say is please don’t go on struggling and suffering. I’ve been quite critical in this podcast of what support is available, and the survey responses would support that — but reach out. Just reach out and talk to somebody. Even if it’s, “Can we go and have a coffee?” or, “Can we go and get a fresh air break?” Please don’t suffer alone.
Paul: Before I close, we have talked about some really tough things in this podcast, particularly the 20% who are experiencing suicidal ideation. Please don’t suffer in silence. I’m just going to echo what Phil has already said.
If you don’t trust the internal employee assistance schemes available to you, please don’t forget your GP. Go and see them. They will treat you with the respect you deserve. If you don’t want to speak to your GP, you can speak to someone like the Samaritans anonymously. Certainly in the UK — and I’m sure other countries have similar services available. Please, please speak to someone before you make any tough decisions.
Phil: Definitely.
Paul: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much again for watching the Forensic Focus Podcast. Phil and I will come back next month and hopefully get to the end of the results.
Phil: I think when we said we could do this in an hour, we were drastically optimistic.
Paul: Yes, I think we were. And hopefully by then we’ll be able to give you some hints as to what we’re doing with the data.
Phil: Yes, let’s do that. It’s a good idea.
Paul: Let’s do that. So thanks again for watching. I hope you really enjoyed the podcast. Please stay safe, everyone.
