MEDINA COUNTY, Ohio — The Medina County Sheriff’s Office is making sure its employees are mentally well and working to shift the conversation around mental health in the department.
Last year, Gov. Mike Dewine awarded the Medina County Sheriff’s Office $36,500 for annual clinician-officer wellness sessions and consultations to assess individual wellness, and the funds have been put to good use.
“We’ve provided a wide array of training for law enforcement to understand how to manage folks, but this is the first time we’ve started to look at wellness services for them,” said Gail Houk, director of forensic services for Alternative Paths, a healthcare service that provides a wide array of outpatient behavioral health throughout Medina County.
Sgt. David Pries, a 30-year veteran of the Medina County Sheriff’s Office, pushed the idea of mental health services for law enforcement employees.
“When you first start in this business, you’re the rough and tough; nothing affects you, nothing bothers you,” he said. “I went to the sheriff when he first took office and said, ‘Look, we aren’t taking care of our young people of the officers that are coming in here,’” he said. “It’s not the major events that affect you; it’s the years and years chipping away, dealing with death, dealing with everyone’s worst days.”
Medina County Sheriff Terry Grice took it to heart and put Rebecca Byrne, the administration services director, on a mission to find ways they could help.
“We knew that there was a grant coming down the pipeline, so we knew that was an opportunity to start that,” she said. “We received $36,500, and part of that money is for wellness check-ins.”
The check-ins are an hour-long, one-on-one session and are for everyone in the department, not just the deputies.
“The time is for the individual to use it in the way that they want to use it. The participants really opened up and talked a lot about the stressors they encountered in their work life,” said Houk.
So far, 155 of their 175 employees have checked in.
Justin Alerio, a Medina County dispatcher, said he didn’t even know he needed to decompress until he spoke with the clinician.
“I try to, I guess, fit the stigma and be the tough guy and not taking it home, but regardless, you’re going to take some of it home whether you realize it or not,” he said. “I was more open to sharing than I thought I would be and was very surprised how much better I felt leaving after that first time.”
Houk said the assessments can also determine if there are more services the employees can utilize.
“We’re hoping that it plants a seed, that it really helps them break the ice and start to self assess and look at ways at their career may be impacting them, but also start to talk about what is out there to help them in the event they need us,” she said.
The grant is only for two years, but Byrne said they’re determined to find ways to carry on mental health check-ins after those two years are up.
The long-term goal is that people are mentally and physically well to continue providing service to the residents of Medina County for years to come.
“If you talk to a majority of people that have been in law enforcement, in any aspect, corrections, dispatch, patrol, they’ll call themselves ‘broken,’ they’ll say, ‘yeah, I’m broken. I’m not the same person I used to be,’” said Pries. “What I’m hoping for is that we keep these younger guys healthy; we keep them in law enforcement longer.”
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