Um artigo sobre suicídios em forças de emergência...interessante

Disturbing legacy of rescues: Suicide
By Jim Hopkins and Charisse Jones, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — The firehouse in Maspeth, Queens, lost 19 firefighters on Sept. 11, 2001.
Surveyor Bob Long, who helped rescue the coal miners, felt tension over film rights.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette; Eileen Blass, USA TODAY
But in the minds of those still working there, the terrorist attacks claimed another life a year later. Gary Celentani, 33, a strapping firefighter who followed two brothers into the New York City Fire Department, was at home Sept. 25, 2002, when he shot himself to death with a rifle.
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Sept. 11's role in Celentani's death may never be known. In the weeks before his suicide, he suffered his mother's death and the end of a romance. Although 6-foot-3, Gary was a "teddy bear," says his brother, Ralph, who believes Sept. 11 was at least part of the reason Gary killed himself. "Nobody knew how much pain he was in," he says.
Celentani's suicide illustrates a disturbing trend that has emerged after tragedies such as last year's Pennsylvania coal mine disaster, the Oklahoma City bombing and Sept. 11. Some of those intimately involved in storied rescue efforts — men and women lauded as heroes — have committed suicide. Experts, citing causes from post-traumatic stress to the destructive power of sudden fame, worry more such deaths will follow.
Bob Long, a surveyor credited with finding the nine trapped coal miners, killed himself in June. Terry Yeakey, an Oklahoma City police sergeant who rescued four bombing victims in 1995, committed suicide the following year. Robert O'Donnell, a paramedic who played a crucial role in saving baby Jessica McClure from a Texas well shaft in 1987, took his life nearly eight years later.
After Sept. 11, at least three New York men involved in rescue and recovery efforts have committed suicide, union officials say. James Kay Jr., an emergency medical technician, shot himself early last year. Six months later, Daniel Stewart, another EMT, hanged himself. And there was Celentani.
What's more, Philip McArdle, the health and safety officer for the 8,600-member Uniformed Firefighters Association, knows of about a half-dozen suicide attempts by other firefighters since Sept. 11. "That number could go higher, depending on what we do to take care of these people," he says.
Experts on suicide agree. "The clock might have started ticking for some of these rescue workers earlier — and this event was a trigger, says Ronald Maris, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of South Carolina."
Steve Cassidy, president of New York's Uniformed Firefighters Association, thinks the ticking started not after Sept. 11, but after June 2002, when the digging at the World Trade Center site came to an end. "When you're busy, you don't have time to focus on your problems," he says.
'Made out to be heroes'
An exact tally of suicides among rescue workers from these and other disasters will never be known. That's partly because suicide overall — the cause of nearly 11 of every 100,000 U.S. deaths annually — is underreported.
At least 100 police officers and paramedics committed suicide while on the job between 1992 and 2001, according to an analysis by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for USA TODAY.
OSHA only tracks on-the-job deaths. Moreover, many states do not track deaths by occupation, making it nearly impossible to study suicide rates of police or firefighters. One of the few such studies, published last year, found that New York City police officers were no more likely to kill themselves than other New Yorkers of comparable race, gender and age. The study covered deaths between 1977 and 1996.
The reasons people kill themselves are often elusive. Yet, common threads emerge in an examination of six suicides in recent high-profile tragedies:
•Post-traumatic stress disorder. Some showed symptoms that included flashbacks, sleeplessness and depression.
Yeakey, 30, who joined the Oklahoma City police five years before the bombing, complained of nightmares and was gripped by thoughts of dead children.
O'Donnell, who slid down a parallel well to save 18-month-old McClure in Midland, Texas, became addicted to painkillers to fight migraines that worsened in the following years. In the days before he used a shotgun to kill himself on a country road, O'Donnell, 37, appeared haunted by the rescue efforts that had just begun in Oklahoma City.
And he became obsessed with his role in the McClure rescue. "That's when his life stopped — when he went down in that well," says Vaughn Donaldson, a district chief in the Midland Fire Department. "It was like he never came out of it mentally."
•Sudden fame. The media can turn these heroes into overnight sensations — for a while. But their lives can spin out of control for good. In Pennsylvania, Long, 37, was catapulted to fame when CNN heralded him as the "man behind the miracle."
His mother, Linda Christner, says reporters barraged Long by phone, fax, e-mail, and in uninvited home visits. They portrayed Long as someone he wasn't. "People are made out to be heroes, when they're not," she says. "Bob didn't feel like he was a hero."
Disney and its ABC network paid Long $150,000 for movie and book rights, the same fee paid to the miners who had been trapped. That led to sniping, some aired in the media, among miners — and among other rescuers who didn't get money.
Many people think they want to be famous — until it hits, says Leo Braudy, a University of Southern California professor who wrote about O'Donnell in The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. "The kinds of hostilities and resentments and envy that it arouses — people are unprepared for that," Braudy says.
•They were all men. Men have long had above-average suicide rates. And men are more likely to use lethal methods such as guns, so are more likely to succeed, Maris says.
They're also are more likely to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs when they're suicidal — clouding their judgment, Maris says. Long, for example, had been drinking just before he shot himself, say published news reports and one of his friends.
Attempts rise after 9/11
Yet, as with all suicides, other issues were at play.
After McClure's rescue from the well shaft in Texas, O'Donnell's marriage failed. Yeakey, because of injuries he sustained at the Oklahoma bomb site, couldn't work; he also had romantic and financial problems.
"There are many, many things working together that push someone into suicide. Being a rescue worker is only one of them," Maris says.
Still, McArdle believes Sept. 11 may have contributed to the decisions of New York rescuers to kill themselves. "We look at past years and ... we haven't had that many suicides in the department," he says. "And then all of a sudden we have a few successful attempts and a few attempts."
Experts say that it is often months or years after a traumatic event before its full impact is felt. That's when "people are past that numbed and shocked sensation, and now they're dealing with their daily lives," says Maureen Tatu, a nurse at St. Luke's Institute for Behavioral Health in Bethlehem, Pa. She counsels victims of post-traumatic stress disorder, including some from Sept. 11.
Among people whose job is to save others, it's especially hard to ask for help, says Kerry Kelly, chief medical officer for the New York fire department.
The department's counseling service sent a therapist or psychologist to each firehouse where someone was killed on Sept. 11. These counselors spoke to firefighters in groups and individually. Often, Kelly says, "the therapist would be pulled aside by a person who would say, 'I'm fine, but I want you to pay attention to this person. I'm concerned about him.' "
For firefighter Celentani and the other men and women who make a living rescuing and tending to others, traumatic situations are a routine part of life. And the pressure of dealing with such emotional events can take a toll.
At one time, there were three Celentani brothers in the fire department: Gene, a retired lieutenant; Ralph, a captain; and Gary, who joined the ranks July 14, 1996.
Gary, like most new firefighters, rotated through different engine and ladder companies. After Sept. 11, he was transferred to the Queens firehouse that housed Squad 288 and Hazmat 1.
In the weeks that followed, he and his brothers worked in the World Trade Center ruins. His two best friends were killed there, says brother Ralph, along with nearly 30 others Gary knew. His life became consumed with attending colleagues' funerals when he wasn't digging through rubble and human remains. He kept a shrine of photos of fallen firefighters in his apartment.
The rescue and recovery efforts weighed on all three brothers. Ralph knew at least 70 firefighters killed. But Gary seemed to suffer more. "He was one of the biggest teddy bears you ever met," Ralph says. Then came the death of their mother, in August 2002, and Gary's breakup with his girlfriend. Nudged by Ralph, he got counseling.
But then, to the shock of family, friends and his counselor, he killed himself. "None of us ever expected he would do what he did," Ralph says.