I Was a Police Photographer. I Now Suffer from PTSD.
By: Fallon Corinne
Tags: PTSD, Police, Life Lessons, Photographer, Mental Health

Photo by zorandim75 on Adobe Stock

Trigger warning: mentions of violent crimes.

No one warns you before you leave law enforcement to watch out for symptoms of PTSD. Your coworkers don’t tell you about the potential nightmares or visual flashbacks you’ll experience in the middle of the day when you happen to see someone that looks exactly like the doppelgänger of a homicide victim from four years ago.

They make no mention of PTSD at your going away luncheon, nor in private conversations leading up to your last day. Because they’re still working in law enforcement and have not allowed themselves to acknowledge that they have it yet. You’re better off talking to someone who has already left, but it feels unseemly to reach out and ask when they seem happier on Facebook at their new job. And you don’t want to disturb the delicate balance of equanimity they’re trying to emanate on social media.

It isn’t until a few months later after leaving your job and starting a new one in a completely different industry on the other side of the country that it dawns on you that you’re about to face a reckoning delivered by your subconscious and psyche.

And it’s no wonder. You’ve had to compartmentalize thousands of crime scenes you’ve either archived or photographed as the department’s civilian Police Photographer. Stuff every horrific image you’ve witnessed on the job deep into the recesses of your brain to avoid dealing with them. In all honesty, you’ve had to do this to survive from one day to the next. There was simply no time to process or grieve, especially when you were expected to upload and archive more incoming photos from a new homicide, two suicides, a suspicious infant death and ten DOAs by Friday. So you told yourself you’d deal with it another day.

But you never did. You tried drinking it away and for a while, that almost seemed to work.

What they don’t tell you is that eventually, your brain is going to run out of space to hide all those gruesome images. That one unsuspecting day, they will begin to re-emerge against your will because your subconscious desperately wants you to deal with them so you can finally heal and let go of all those latent memories your soul felt deeply when your brain refused to let you. Because they did affect you, of course, they did. You’re human, after all. And you should feel comforted by that fact. The truth is, you’d have a much bigger problem on your hands if it didn’t affect you at all.

After your new psychologist diagnoses you with PTSD and increases the dosage of your antidepressants to the highest possible allowed, you find out first hand that the healing process does not take a linear route, much to your chagrin. There are good days. There are terrible weeks and months. It’s not going to be an easy process and finished within a weekend like your new employers in the entertainment industry are hoping for. After all, you saw thousands of victims. You can’t recall most of their names or case numbers anymore like you once did. But you’ll never forget their faces. Or what was left of them.

When your PTSD begins disrupting your life and your performance at work, you try to explain to them why and how, but when you see confusion looking back at you, you try to calm your anxiety of not being understood by envisioning yourself in their shoes. They just don’t get it, and how could they when they’ve never seen what you have? They’ve never sacrificed their mental health in order to help others. No, you weren’t a detective who solved cases, nor were you a prosecutor who made sure justice was served. But you helped detectives and prosecutors by providing them with photographic evidence. You were a small cog in the justice system, and it appeased that need inside of you to help others.

You try explaining that to them, but it just doesn’t compute. They simply can’t wrap their minds around the fact that you have seven years worth of victims and their crime scenes stored in your mind. They don’t understand that you no longer have control anymore over when they flash before your eyes in the middle of a meeting when your coworkers are bigging up a show that involves characters shooting with guns. And that your mind automatically reroutes to seeing two of your coworkers with their blood and brains outside of their lifeless bodies, because yes, you had to witness that too.

The new employers fire you for a number of reasons, one of them being they don’t have the patience for the amount of doctors appointments you have despite having encouraged you to make use of the company health insurance and to get help. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. You’re unemployed now from the job you left the police department to escape from having to add any more victims to the tally you’ve seen. For the first few days, it feels like your life is over because you can barely function as it is but you’re now forced to start packing two suitcases and throwing all your belongings away since you won’t be able to make rent. They fired you in the middle of a pay cycle and your roommates want you out by Saturday. You were let go on Tuesday and Thursday is Thanksgiving.

Despite your current mind fuck, you make sure that not a day goes by in which you forget to remind yourself that the victims you’ve seen will never have a second chance to have a bad day, let alone text a friend, go for a walk, laugh, drink their favorite cup of coffee, have sex, grow old, make amends, chase their dreams. But you do. Regardless of hitting what feels like rock bottom, you have second, third, fourth and fifth chances with air in your lungs and a pulse beneath your skin. They don’t. The memory of them serves to help rather than harm you during this trying time by reminding you that you’re pretty lucky after all.

After a good friend flys you back home to let you stay with them, you decide to make the most out of life and pursue your dreams of writing a book finally after years of running in society’s hamster wheel race. For the first time in years, you have the luxury of time, unemployment money and a safe place to stay. What better time than now during a horrific pandemic when it’s best that you stay home anyway? Eventually, you acknowledge that while your ex-employers used your mental illness against you, those cunts actually did you a favor and helped save your life by firing you, forcing you to move back home and out of what would end up becoming one of the hardest-hit areas ravaged by Covid.

You learned many life lessons during your time as a Police Photographer with the most important one being that life is fucking short. You promise yourself and the victims in your psyche that you’ll honor them by not wasting yours.