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The hidden cost carried by those who protect and care for the rest of us, and why it can be measured and trained.
We ask a certain kind of person to run toward what the rest of us run from. The Police officer, the firefighter, the paramedic, the nurse, the physician, and the people who command and care for them. We ask them to absorb the emergencies, the violence, the dying, and the grief, and then to do it again the next day and the next day. For a long time we assumed they simply could. The evidence now says otherwise, and it says it clearly enough that no responsible leader can look away.
The scale, in today’s numbers
This is not a soft problem, and it is not a fading one.
Police. Officers are now more likely to die by their own hand than in the line of duty. In 2017, the year that first made national news, there were 140 police suicides against 129 line-of-duty deaths, and 103 firefighter suicides against 93 line-of-duty deaths (Ruderman Family Foundation, 2018). The most complete recent dataset counts 1,287 law-enforcement and corrections officers’ suicides from 2016 through 2022, peaking at 234 in a single year; among those lost, more than a quarter carried diagnosed PTSD and only 23 percent had ever sought help (CNA and First H.E.L.P., 2024). A careful international review of more than 272,000 officers puts PTSD at about 14 percent and depression at about 15 percent, roughly double the general population (Syed et al., 2020).
Firefighters. The male firefighter suicide rate is 33.8 per 100,000, nearly twice that of comparable working-age adults, and about one in five (20%) firefighters and paramedics (20%) will meet the criteria for PTSD during a career, against a general-population lifetime risk near 7 % (U.S. Fire Administration, 2024; National Fallen Firefighters Foundation).
Paramedics and EMS. More than one in twenty deaths among EMS clinicians is a suicide, more than double the rate in the general public, and Fire and EMS personnel report attempting suicide at many times the civilian rate (Vigil et al., 2019).
Nurses, physicians, and the people who lead them. Female nurses die by suicide at roughly twice the rate of other women (Davis et al., JAMA Psychiatry, 2021). Physician burnout reached 62.8 percent at its 2021 peak and remains near half the profession (American Medical Association and Mayo Clinic). Before the pandemic, some 40 percent of nurses already intended to leave practice within two years. In 2022 the U.S. Surgeon General took the rare step of issuing a formal Advisory warning that health-worker burnout had reached “crisis levels,” and the CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has named first-responder suicide a public-health priority in a document titled, plainly, a Call to Action.
The root under the symptom
Behind these different numbers is one common thread, and naming it correctly is the whole point. When the U.S. government ran its landmark survey of police stress, more than 2,200 officers across 19 departments, it found that anxiety was correlated with more problems than any other single factor measured: more behavioral problems, more medical and somatic problems, more psychological and attitudinal problems than anything else in the study (Hurrell, Pate, and Kliesmet, for NIOSH, 1984).
The number that names it: 27
That survey is NIOSH Technical Report 84-108, and the finding is not a summary sentence. It is a table. Table 17 counts, for every factor the researchers measured, how many significant relationships it had at the .01 level across six categories of officer problem.
Anxiety scored 27. Depression, the next highest, scored 14. Type A personality reached 11, job security 9, union membership 8, role conflict 8, boredom 6. Not one other factor in the entire study even reached 15.
Anxiety was not the loudest problem. It was the most connected one.
And here is the part that should stop any leader who is reading this: the officers did NOT report themselves as anxious. Most rated themselves highest on placidity.
The report records “quite low levels of troubled conditions reflecting anxiety, depression or irritability.” The thing most connected to their problems was the thing they were least likely to name. Please read this again:
The thing most connected to their problems was the thing they were least likely to name.
That matters because a symptom you might not even be able to recognize and even then you can only barely manage is a very different thing from a root that you can change. Anxiety is not a character flaw and it is not a fixed harsh sentence. It has a measurable signature in the brain’s own electrical activity, in EEG Alpha activity, and that signature can be trained and changed. When high anxiety people take the Biocybernaut Alpha 1 training and they learn to increase their EEG Alpha activity above their initial pre-training Eyes-Closed baseline, using Biocybernaut’s intensive 7-consecutive day Alpha training programs, their anxiety drops, often below average.
The cost to the institution, not only the person
Even measured coldly, just in budgets, the case for intervention with this training is overwhelming. Physician burnout alone drains an estimated $4.6 billion dollars a year from the U.S. health system (Han et al., 2019). In emergency medical services, the median cost of replacing a single departing worker is about $71,600 dollars, and 44 percent of those who leave name their own physical or mental health as the reason. Across the country, first-responder PTSD is now driving a rising tide of workers’ compensation claims and presumption laws (RAND Corporation). This is precisely the crisis that, decades ago, drove the Los Angeles Police Department toward a wave of stress-disability pensions large enough to worry the city’s budget. The City dealt with the financial problem by making it harder to qualify for a stress disability. The stress that is left unmeasured does not disappear. It reappears as disability, as turnover, as error, and as liability.
Why the usual answers fall short
The standard responses are a wellness poster, an employee assistance phone number, a debriefing after the worst calls, and an appeal to resilience. These are not worthless, but they share a serious common flaw: none of them measures anything, and none of them trains away the root cause of the experience of anxiety. They ask a nervous system that has been held at high alert for years to simply relax, and then treat its failure to do so as a personal shortcoming. The people in the detailed Case Histories described on this site had almost all been through that entire list of options before they came to us, and with every option before Biocybernaut, they had come away still suffering, and half-convinced the fault was in their character.
What Biocybernaut brings: a measured, trainable answer
For over fifty years my work has been about one question: can a person learn to change the electrical activity of their own brain, and does it help? The answer, scientifically documented and published, is yes.
- In the journal Science in 1978, Dr. Joe Kamiya and I showed that anxiety is inversely related to the brain’s Alpha activity, and that teaching people to raise their Alpha lowers both momentary anxiety (called State Anxiety) and the deeper, Trait Anxiety that behaves like a fixed part of the personality.
- Other laboratories confirmed and extended it. Peniston and Kulkosky reported an 80 percent recovery rate in chronic alcoholics with this kind of training, showed that it changed the brain’s own beta-endorphin chemistry, and then reported success in treating post-traumatic stress in Vietnam veterans.
- In 1985 I trained two twelve-man teams of U.S. Army Special Forces, the Green Berets. In direct proportion to the Alpha they gained, their depression, paranoia, rigidity of thinking, and fatigue fell, and their intuition, self-regard, and self-actualizing values rose, several of these changes at high statistical significance. Two-thirds of these elite soldiers chose to do extra sessions on their own free time.
- The nine detailed case histories on this site show the same thing in ordinary people and in police officers: the detective, the Deputy Chief, the Captain, the motorcycle officer.
This is why, in 1992, after Police Chief Joseph McNamara of San Jose, California did the seven-day Biocybernaut Alpha training himself, he said simply: “Every police officer in the country should do this training.” It is why Dr. McNamara supported this research in a grant application that became the subject of a formal application to the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, with a proposal to run the Biocybernaut Alpha training as a controlled study of 200 officers. The training does not ask a suffering person to be stronger. It measures the root cause of anxiety and the Alpha brain wave antidote and then it trains the antidote.
None of this is a promise of cure, and none of it is medical advice. It is a case for doing the one thing the usual answers skip: measuring the thing that is actually driving the harm, and training it down.
If you carry this condition, or you command those who do
One more thing worth knowing before you decide whether this is real. In 1995 I took this argument to the federal government with the help of Dr. Joe McNamara, the former Chief of Police of San Jose, who had just become a Fellow at the prestigious Hoover Institute at Stanford University.
I applied to the National Institute of Justice to close the loop: 200 officers of the large San Jose police department were to be measured, 100 of them trained, with follow-up at four, eight and twelve months. That study has still not been done, by anyone. The correlation between anxiety and 27 different institutional problems at the .01 statistical significance level has been sitting in a federal report since 1984 and the fast, 7-day method of treating this, Biocybernaut Alpha training, has been in the literature since 1978. Shall we consider action now?
If you lead a police department, a fire service, an EMS agency, a hospital, or any team where the pressure is high and the permission to admit it is low, the numbers above are your people, and the cost above is already on your books. And if you are the person in that chair yourself, quietly carrying more than you can say to anyone, this page is for you most of all.
Please talk with us. My assistants will hear you out properly, with no pressure and no performance review, and they will tell you honestly what they think, including if they think this Alpha training is not the right fit. When a conversation goes further, it can sometimes come as far as me directly. I will not pretend that is automatic, because it is not, but people do ask, and it is a fair thing to ask for.
You can reach us at biocybernaut.com/contact-us, or call 855-798-3814. That line reaches Alexis directly, including after hours, and can forward to Kate O’Connor.
And if you are in immediate danger right now, please reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline (call or text 988) or your local emergency number first. That help exists this minute; we do not replace it, and I would far rather tell you so than have you wait.
References
From Biocybernaut’s federal research record (the 1995 National Institute of Justice application; a proposal, not a funded grant):
Hurrell, J.J., Pate, A., & Kliesmet, R. Stress Among Police Officers. U.S. DHHS, Public Health Service, CDC (NIOSH Technical Report 84-108), 1984.
Hardt, J.V. & Kamiya, J. Anxiety change through EEG alpha feedback: Seen only in high anxiety subjects. Science, 201, 79-81, 1978.
Peniston, E.G. & Kulkosky, P.J. Alpha-Theta Brainwave Training and Beta-Endorphin Levels in Alcoholics. Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, 13(2), 271-279, 1989; and Peniston & Kulkosky (1993), post-traumatic stress in Vietnam veterans.
McCafferty, F.L. et al. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder in the Police Officer. Southern Medical Journal, 83(5), 543-547, 1990; and Stress and Suicide in Police Officers. Southern Medical Journal, 85(3), 233-243, 1992.
House, J.S. Occupational Stress and Coronary Heart Disease: A Review and Theoretical Integration. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 15, 12-27, 1974.
Miletich, J.J. Police, Firefighter, and Paramedic Stress: An Annotated Bibliography. Greenwood Press, 1990.
Current data (2019-2026):
CNA & First H.E.L.P. Suicide Data for Public Safety Officers, 2024.
Ruderman Family Foundation. Police Officers and Firefighters Are More Likely to Die by Suicide than in the Line of Duty (2017 data), 2018.
Syed, S. et al. Global prevalence of PTSD and depression among police. Occupational & Environmental Medicine, 2020.
U.S. Fire Administration, Mental Health & Well-Being Workgroup Report, 2024; National Fallen Firefighters Foundation.
Vigil, N.H. et al. Death by Suicide: The EMS Profession Compared to the General Public, 2019.
Davis, M.A. et al. Nurse suicide in the United States. JAMA Psychiatry, 2021.
American Medical Association & Mayo Clinic, national physician burnout study (Shanafelt et al.), 2023.
U.S. Surgeon General. Advisory on Health Worker Burnout, 2022; CDC/NIOSH, Suicides Among First Responders: A Call to Action, 2021.
Han, S. et al. Estimating the Attributable Cost of Physician Burnout in the United States. Annals of Internal Medicine, 2019.
