Study Praises a Unique Canadian Police Training Program to Deal Mentally Ill

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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A recently published study has declared that a one of its kind police training program of using actors to depict people with various psychiatric disorders seems to be working to teach police officers about how to deal with such situations more efficiently. The results were released on Monday by the researchers of University of Alberta, and it has come at such a time when other studies complain that mentally ill are being unreasonably treated and represented in arrest data, while police forces face massive inquiry for violent, and sometimes fatal, confrontations with mentally ill.

A psychiatrist in the university’s faculty of medicine and dentistry and lead investigator of the study, Peter Silverstone, stated that “we all hear tragic situations in which sometimes perhaps a greater understanding of mental illness would’ve been helpful.” The study published in the journal, called Frontiers in Psychiatry, revealed that more than 600 officers of the Edmonton Police Service participated in the program, which allowed each to interact with actors in six different scenarios. The scenarios included having officers respond to a depressed and belligerent person who was near a weapon, a psychotic individual experiencing hallucinations, and an excited individual behaving strangely on a public street.

Every officer later discussed his performance and took feedback from supervising officers, psychologists and the actors. Silverstone pointed out that “If you can give them the skills to increase the perceived empathy, that’s very important,” and “we all want to feel that somebody understands us at a fundamental level.”

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