Putative risk and resiliency factors among Royal Canadian Mounted Police cadets

Abstract

ObjectiveMental health disorders are prevalent among active-duty Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers. The current study was designed to assess whether RCMP cadets commencing the Cadet Training Program are inherently at greater risk of developing mental health challenges by statistically comparing cadet putative risk and resiliency scores to scores from young adult populations. The study was also designed to assess for sociodemographic differences in putative risk and resiliency variables among RCMP cadets in order to facilitate future comparisons.MethodsCadets (n = 772; 72.2% men) completed self-report measures of several putative risk variables (i.e., anxiety sensitivity, fear of negative evaluation, pain anxiety, illness and injury sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, and state anger) and resiliency. Scores were statistically compared to samples from Canadian, American, Australian, and European young adult populations.ResultsCadets had statistically significantly lower scores on all putative risk variables and statistically significantly higher resiliency scores compared to the young adult populations. In the cadet sample, there were statistically significant differences in putative risk and resiliency variables across gender and sex.ConclusionCadets’ significantly lower scores on putative risk variables and higher scores on resiliency suggest that they may be psychologically strong; as such, it may be that the nature of police work, as opposed to inherent individual differences in risk and resiliency, accounts for active-duty RCMP officers’ comparatively higher prevalence of mental health disorders over time.Clinical Trial Registration: ClinicalTrials.gov, Identifier NCT05527509.

Exposures to potentially psychologically traumatic events among Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

“…There are longstanding notions that mental disorders among RCMP result from recruiting people who are inherently unfit. Recent research has evidenced that RCMP cadets begin their training particularly healthy, reporting fewer exposures to PPTEs than serving RCMP (Andrews et al, 2023), lower prevalence of mental health disorders than serving RCMP and the general population (Carleton et al, 2023), and lower scores on putative psychological risk factors than the general population (Khoury et al, 2023). Collectively, recent results implicate mental health challenges among RCMP as caused by service experiences rather than preexisting mental health challenges and pretraining exposure histories.…”