What Happens When the Helpers Need the Help? Destigmatizing Mental Health Through Fiction

A cop needs help; a cop won’t ask for it. The spiral begins. This is where we meet my series character Det. Harriet Foster in Edge. A complicated, traumatized character, Harriet has taken her baggage, her emotional demons, her feelings of loss and grief and guilt and stuffed them down into a deep hole, hoping by ignoring pain she will feel no pain. Every human knows that never works. Book humans are slow learners.

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In Edge, Harri’s come to a point where she’s got no more room in that hole to shove another trauma into. She’s reached capacity. Her emotions are raw. Her fists are clenched. The timebomb is ticking. The story begins there.

What do cops do when they find it difficult to cope with the stresses of the job and the competing stresses of just plain dealing with life? Divorce rates are higher for cops, so are the rates for alcoholism and addiction, and sadly suicides. As I work on Harriet’s arc and move her through the series, I needed these issues to sit in the pit of her stomach along with all the other things, to have the unspoken pressures of her job gnaw at the very fibers of her soul. She’s supposed to be strong. She’s supposed to be the one who serves and protects. Protecting herself is not on the agenda.

As I started writing Harriet, a sad thing was happening where I live: The city of Chicago suffered a spate of cop suicides all in a short amount of time, almost one after the other, it seemed, without explanation. It was baffling, it was frightening, it was soul-wrenching. Writers try to understand things. I think that’s why most of us write. We write to make sense of human nature, to discover why people do the things they do. Do our bad guys, our villains, somehow help us understand evil or psychopathy? Does writing trauma and human frailty give us a better understanding of both? Maybe a little.

The interesting part for me about Harriet’s emotional journey, her white-knuckled approach to “getting through” the day, the week, the case, was her silence. She suffers in silence. I wrote her this way not even fully realizing at the time that there was a reason I did it.

Stigma.

Most cops don’t talk about their feelings. Most cops don’t say they need help. Most cops don’t seek it even when they need it. For some, there’s a stigma attached to talking to somebody. I needed Harriet to worry about that.

Harriet is African American. She is female. She is a product of her community where there is some reticence to seeking mental health assistance for fear of being labeled crazy or unbalanced in the face of struggle. Keep it together, pray about it, stay strong. That’s the advice and the expectation. Folks like Harriet hold it in, they do not talk to strangers about the things that haunt them. I brought this reticence, this community expectation into the story, as well.

That stigma follows her on her job, and it’s no small thing there, either. What cop wants to admit they can’t keep it together, that they struggle with the pressure, that they are not doing okay when they’re expected to be okay? Harriet is Black, she is female, she is working in a department that was not set up for people like her, in her mind, she cannot be the one to cry uncle.

So, now what?

If she is not strong on the job or solid on the job, if her ability to hold it together is called into question, her career suffers. No cop wants to be the cop other cops worry about holding up their end. That’s more pressure to conform, to stuff, to keep it moving. I wanted Harriet to wrestle with all of this, but I also wanted to give her a way out. I wanted to take that two-pronged stigma and break through it, and have Harriet move forward in a healthy way.

As I build Harriet on the page, I’m intrigued by the box I’ve put her in. Harriet is on the edge of breaking, a nod to the book's title, but she’s also on the edge of discovering that she alone cannot dig out of the hole she’s made for herself. She needs direction, she needs a helping hand. And still she cannot bring herself to ask for it. It’s frustrating, it’s human, for me writing about it, it’s fascinating.

In Edge, Harri is ordered by her sergeant, who sees the trainwreck coming, to get herself some help. Ordered. More tension. More conflict. And resistance is futile. Who’s going to tell their boss to go flip herself? Harriet is now forced to unpack all of her stuff. Painfully. She must now confront her misery head-on. For her, it’s like having to free a monster from a dungeon knowing full well that beast will devour her whole.

Conflict is the fuel that drives fiction. Inner conflict is my favorite kind. The things we bury are almost always infinitely more interesting than the things we don’t. Same holds for fictional characters.

Writing about police officers is not something I take lightly. It’s a tough job. Those who do it well, we commend for their duty and sacrifice. But how often do we really think about the toll the job takes, the scars it leaves behind? I wanted to show some of that with Harriet. I wanted to write about cops on the job, but cops when their shift is over and they go home and take that star and gun off their belts. What’s an off-duty cop look like? Is there really such a thing? How does a cop recalibrate when they’ve seen the most horrendous things on their shift, and then have to go home to spouses and children, family, and be normal, invested, loving? We can imagine why some might struggle. Most of us are asleep at 2 a.m. when shooting calls come in. Cops are the ones picking their way down dark alleys knowing there might be a gun pointed at their heads.

The toll. The scarring. The unvoiced questions about competency when help is needed. Pressure.

I finally put Harriet in a room with her vulnerabilities and left her there with a police psychologist. These session scenes were the hardest to write. I took great care writing Harriet’s pain. The session scenes were like an intense chess match between two masters. The therapist moved, Harriet retreated; Harriet moved, the therapist listened. There was more conveyed in the silences than I could ever have said in actual dialogue.

Stigma, the one Harriet feels from her community and the one she imagines her department will impose, don’t make it past the therapist’s door. That was intentional. I wanted Harriet to have a safe space.

The place I send Harriet to in the book is an actual place in Chicago, a resource for cops and others. I’ve changed the name, but the help is real, and it saves lives.

I write fiction. I write to understand things. I write characters I hope will resonate with readers. I write characters who look and feel and think like we do. People. Humans.

I’m excited to see who wins that chess match. Maybe it’ll be like the one in Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. No plague, and I’m not sure which one, Harriet or the doctor, is Death, but the stakes feel almost as high.

Good luck, Harriet. Your move.

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