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rather than having to write a program for every single person on their own.
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And I'll spell that to you because it's not as you think.
T E A M B U I L D R.com.
Welcome to the Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on
the show firefighters, Jeff Lassers and Mike Mattern and licensed social worker, Manisha
Leary.
Now in this conversation, we discuss a host of topics from their respective journeys into
their fields, the rebirth that Detroit is seeing, the mental health crisis in Michigan,
Frontline Strong Together, the program between the state of Michigan and Wayne State University
to provide mental health resources to their first responders and so much more.
Now before we get to this incredible conversation, as I say every week, please just take a moment.
Go to whichever app you listen to this on, subscribe to the show, leave feedback and
leave a rating.
Every single five star rating truly does elevate this podcast, therefore making it easier for
others to find.
And this is a free library of well over 1000 episodes now.
So all I ask in return is that you help share these incredible men and women stories so
I can get them to every single person on planet earth who needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Jeff Lassers, Mike Mattern and Manisha Leary.
Enjoy.
Well Mike, Jeff and Manisha, I want to welcome you all onto the Behind the Shield podcast
today.
Thanks for having us.
That's kind of a big deal for us.
Thanks for having us.
Well, likewise, I was on your Minds of the Frontline podcast not too long ago, so I want
to thank you for that.
Very first question, let's start with Mike and Jeff because I know you're in two different
locations.
So Mike and Jeff, where are we finding you this afternoon?
We are in downtown Detroit.
We're actually at the Wayne State University in the heart of downtown Detroit in our podcast
studio.
If you look out the window, you can see Ford Field, the Rensen, the River, Comerica Park.
You can literally, we have the view of Detroit.
It's pretty iconic.
Beautiful.
And Manisha, what about you?
I'm still in Michigan.
I'm not, and my view is not as scenic as the guys, but I'm a few miles away, still in Michigan
enjoying our cold and snowy day today.
So I'm excited to be here.
Nothing's on fire, but it's pretty cold out there.
Yeah.
I won't show you outside my window.
It'll break your heart.
All right.
Well, let's start at the very beginning.
There's three of you, so I want to kind of just get the timelines of each of you into
your chosen professions, and then there'll definitely be an intersection of how you all
met.
So Jeff, let's start with you.
Tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what
your parents did, how many siblings.
You got it.
I was born in Dearborn, Michigan, actually, which is right next to Detroit.
My parents, my mom was a Michigander.
My dad lived in about 10 different states, maybe even more than that, before he was even
18.
He's originally from Illinois, Chicago area, where most of his family's from, and he moved
to the Detroit area in the late 70s, early 80s, back when there was a whole lot of jobs
to be had in the Detroit area for the computer and engineering type human beings.
My mother worked for General Motors.
It's about as Detroit as it could possibly get.
One of my parents worked for GM and the big three, and the other one worked for a subsidiary
of the big three.
And so I wasn't around any first responders.
Nobody was really military in my family other than a grandfather who served in World War
II.
And so service or public service wasn't really a thing other than becoming a lawyer or even
a judge in my family.
So I had this weird thing that I always felt different than other of my family members.
My one brother is an engineer.
My dad had his master's in business, uncles with PhDs.
I just wasn't me.
I wasn't really a school kid.
And everybody kind of knew it, even though they really wanted me to be.
So after an attempt at a university at Western Michigan University, I finally pulled the
trigger and said, I can't do this.
I've always been thinking about being a firefighter.
Always wanted to be a firefighter since I was six years old.
And I always kind of felt like a pipe dream just based on how my cultural upbringing was.
The expectation was degrees, wear a suit, those type of white collar dreams that your
mom has for you, doing real well, right?
Well, it didn't fit the mold.
And then when I entered that world and finally dove in, I became a straight A student.
I was early to everything.
My life came together weird and the real me kind of showed up.
But one of the big events that solidified it for me is when I was a little kid, my dad,
when I grew up with my father and he passed away when he was 57 years old.
And that was about 12 years ago.
He was very brittle diabetic, but he was the most compliant diabetic you've ever met.
He swam a mile every day.
His diet was perfect.
He checked his blood sugar a million times.
He was dialed in.
Even then, that disease is very, very hard.
He had it since he was about 17 years old.
But there was a couple of times where I'd have to call 911 because I couldn't get him
out of it.
I couldn't get him to drink any sugar, get him to eat anything.
And it got to a point where my skills of talking him down for the hundredth time wasn't working.
And so 911 would need to show up.
And that camaraderie, that team that would show up, take care of business, be my friend
for that short amount of time and leave with everything good left a massive impression
on me.
And I'll never forget those guys.
And that's where we are today.
So just to clarify, that was a type one diabetic?
Yes.
Yeah.
He got late onset juvenile diabetes.
So he was 17 years old.
He was a little bit overweight, but it wasn't linked to that.
His mother was also a type one diabetic.
And then he caught the genetic bullet as well.
Luckily, my brother and I have avoided it.
Yeah.
That's so sad.
I mean, if you think about what you just said and how we hear most type one diabetics and
the diligence that they take, it's almost haunting because type two obviously is nearly
always diet related.
And it's kind of the polar opposite.
It's a disregard of all that diligence to the type one diabetic shows.
Yeah.
I get a little stuck in my craw a little bit when I see people abusing their bodies like
this.
Like, man, do you know how many people wish they had all their parts working and you're
just doing this?
Yeah.
So.
Yeah.
But it is.
So it's sad.
I don't know if it was real, if it was Photoshopped, but I remember seeing, I think I forget which
fast food company it was, Subway or something like that.
And their soda, if you bought the soda, then they made a contribution to the American Diabetes
Association.
I think if that was true, then that that explains, you know, that's the perfect analogy for what's
broken in this country.
We'll stay in on Detroit for a moment.
I think especially with the opioid crisis and seeing the predatory actions of those
companies praying like Purdue praying on areas where there was thriving industry and then
there was a void.
And then we see obviously the mental health kind of domino effect after that.
What have you heard as far as your parents' story of thriving Detroit and then the lack
of industry and the impact on their community?
I think guys like Mike and I, we grew up right next to Detroit.
Him closer to me.
He grew up in Dearborn, which is right next to it.
I grew up in Lavonia, which is a stone's throw away from Dearborn, just on their side, basically.
And growing up in the 90s, first of all, we had the Detroit Redwings.
Right.
So I was downtown all the time going to hockey games, Joe Louis Arena, Tiger Stadium.
My neighbor was the groundskeeper for the old Tiger Stadium.
So I was always downtown.
It was awesome.
So downtown to me was always this cool place that used to be one of the biggest metropolises
in the world.
In the history of the world, Detroit was at one time one of the biggest metropolises.
And then to see the shell of it in those late 80s, 90s was a ghost town.
And you heard all the stories and it's dangerous and it's this and that.
This is a very big city.
So not every area is the same.
And so when my dad came to Detroit, he would literally, we drive downtown, he's like, see
this place right here.
It was all open, thriving stores and office buildings and this and that.
And it's parking as far as you can see.
There's nobody there.
Yeah.
And so you got this crazy shell with this amazing architecture, this lost Gothic mid-century
architecture, this beautiful town, beautiful churches, churches, the ballroom type houses
and this forgotten history.
And then what happened for a while.
But the good news is Detroit's been on the upswing for the last 10 years.
And just walking around this area is so beautiful.
The restaurants, I will put up downtown Detroit restaurants up against top 25 in the US.
We got awesome stuff to do.
It's beautiful.
So we hope to get it back to where it was.
It was like the third wealthiest city in the world at one time.
I don't think we're going to get quite there, but it would be nice to have this vibrant
place and community that takes advantage of its natural landscapes and the things we already
built here.
And there's a lot of people reinvesting in the city.
That's the nice part is it's really coming back like you talked about, but there's people
willing to reinvest in the city.
And that's really where we're seeing that comeback of the city.
Yes.
Well, Manisha, just your perspective, what have you heard?
Obviously, you're treating a lot of people with origin stories and you've got your own
observation as well living closer to Detroit.
What have you heard and or observation or from your family as far as that thriving element,
the kind of decline and then hopefully again, this kind of upward swing that you're seeing
too?
Yeah, so I think for the city of Detroit in the time that we kind of like lost its luster
and even the surrounding areas around the city, drawing the drugs, the opioid, cocaine,
heroin, meth, like all of the things that have plagued our city.
I think the state as a whole kind of suffered when the big city suffered.
So and I think when it comes around to not necessarily putting the two together, a lot
of people like to separate what's happening with the economy or what's happening with
our society and kind of distant, like separate the people from that.
You can't do that.
You can't do it.
It's hard to do that.
So I know a lot of people, what they see on the news and what they hear on the news in
these different places, there's people living these lives.
There's people struggling through these economies and being, you know, losing houses, losing
jobs when the economy was bad, when the depression was bad.
All of this left people with fight or flight, living in fight or flight mode and feeling
like they had to survive a place that they once thrived in.
And I think overall that just talks to how mental health has always kind of been a thing.
And I think back then people really didn't want to talk about it because it was a sign
of weakness.
And what we're seeing now coming with the city thriving over the last, again, 10 years
or so and people learning more about how to reach out and who to reach out to, I think
we're in a space of people being a little bit more open to talking about things and
to addressing things and being more communicative about things that they're struggling with,
which we didn't see that a long time ago.
So I guess the moral of it is that, you know, the people are a reflection of the city.
And so I think that when you see your people starting to do good and to being out and riding
their bikes and being by the riverfront and enjoying the restaurants and doing all these
things that revitalizes the city.
You see people, I think, owning Detroit again.
Absolutely.
In a way that we have never seen before.
It used to be like very segregated racially, like a lot.
And I grew up in an area where there wasn't people being as kind about the racial segregation
that existed in a not so spoken objective way.
But now it's like everybody just owns Detroit.
Like you literally go down and the Internet.
It's so nice now compared to what we saw in the past, especially through like the 08
and the big recession.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, it was bad for a while.
It's interesting.
I had author Sam Quinones on the show for the second time and he wrote Dreamland and
that followed the city of Portsmouth, Ohio.
And what initially was Oxycontin, then into the black tie heroin from Mexico and Dreamland
was this community pool, outdoor pool that they had.
And as the city of Portsmouth declined, it was closed down.
But the whole point was when, as you said, when the city was thriving, communities were
coming together again of all colors and creeds, swimming and lying out in the grass.
But what was interesting in the second interview, which is a few years later, Sam said that
Portsmouth has now become a hub for recovery.
So now you've got all these these gentrification is the wrong word, but kind of reinvesting
in the area and stores and restaurants and barbershops are opening up again and people
are coming to Portsmouth from other parts of Ohio to get clean.
So I really believe in I think hope is just the word that we need in society.
Full stop.
But I really feel like we were in a low and I think the fire service we are in a low right
now, and it's funny what Manisha said.
Your people are a reflection of how well your city is doing.
I would argue your people are a reflection of how well your fire department or your leadership
is doing.
If they're dying and leaving, maybe it's not doing so well.
But I think that's also a beautiful opportunity to finally let that pendulum swing back the
other way and start healing.
Absolutely.
All right.
Well, Jeff, to you, same question.
Where were you born?
What did your parents do?
How many siblings?
I think you mean Mike.
I'm sorry, Mike.
No, it's all good.
It's all good.
I was born in Dearborn, Michigan.
My parents, my mom was a school secretary, actually a school secretary, actually a couple
of schools that I went to.
So I had to keep my nose clean.
My dad worked at Grainger for 30 years.
And then I got an older sister who is a nurse out at U of M Mott Children's Hospital in
the NICU.
I was born, I literally was born knowing I wanted to be a firefighter.
There was nothing else in this world that I ever had any idea what I wanted to do.
It was just be a firefighter.
And even when I got old enough and I learned my uncle was a firefighter, that was like
having him in the family was awesome because I could, you know, every year for my birthday,
I would go to the firehouse.
That was like my trip for the birthday.
Those types of things.
And it's kind of cool now because the firehouses that I used to go to as a kid are the ones
that I work in now.
So I grew up in this department.
I grew up in the city.
And it was one of those things knowing what I wanted to do early on in my life, it made
the trajectory that much easier.
So like my senior year of high school, I took college classes so that I could jump right
into EMT the day I graduated.
So I got my EMT license when I was 18.
I got my medic when I was 19 and went through fire academy, was out ready to go at age 20.
Ended up getting hired a couple, month or two after I turned 21 and just been in the
fire service since.
How can I get about the same time I started for you like what?
Oh, six or six.
I started for as well.
So how competitive was recruitment back then for you two?
Oh my gosh.
I mean, it was where I got hired, I remember there was over 200 people who applied for
six positions.
Yeah.
And it was pretty good shot.
200 is pretty good for six back then.
Back then we were seeing a thousand for none because they just need to make a list.
And the funny part was, I mean, you were applying at every city that you could apply to and
we were running in, you're running into people.
You're making friends with the same guys.
And all the interviews, how did that interview go in this city?
Because we're all fighting for the same crumbs.
And the process was insane.
If you didn't have a high test score, I mean, they weren't even looking at you.
If you didn't have a 98.
Yeah.
And so the recruitment, I mean, there wasn't a recruitment.
They didn't go looking for you.
The recruitment was the availability of the job.
Yes.
The retention was the pay.
If you look at what we were making in 04 compared to now, and you compare that to the economics,
I don't think I've gotten a raise at all.
From 04 to 08, we know what happened.
And then they tried to come back.
And I don't know if you Michigan politics and economics during that time, we had a governor
named Schneider that tore us apart and led to a lot of financial crisis here.
A lot of benefits being.
Yeah.
Not to mention Flint and everything else where, yeah, it's a much different thing now.
So weird how the competitive nature for getting the job went down where we're hiring people
without even fire one and two anymore.
That's amazing.
We're paying somebody to go to the fire academy.
Good for them.
I'm not trying to talk bad about it.
It's great for the new employee, but it's weird.
It's so weird.
It's odd because it was tooth and nail.
You were fighting people for jobs.
Yeah.
Studying.
The amount of studying I was doing.
And then you had to worry about the psychology test.
You're doing 1200 questions on do you see spirits and doorknobs or do you ever feel
like there's a tight band around your head?
Have you ever slept in a bed with your mother?
Who's a better question?
Who's a better president?
You know, Washington and why?
And I'm like, what are you doing to me?
Yeah, that was insane.
Well, Manisha, I think if I'm not mistaken, the one that we took, I took, I mean, higher
layer, we literally took at least 1500 questions.
And it was exactly that.
Do you like puppies?
Do you like flowers?
Do you like the ocean?
Do you like touching kids?
Do you like cooking?
What was that last one?
You know, and you're like after an hour, you're cross-eyed.
But I think that was the MMPI, multifaceted Minnesota.
Yes, that's the one.
Inventory.
So let's put that to Manisha for a second, because I'm curious.
So far, I don't want to skew your answer, but so far, the psychiatrists, psychologists,
counselors that have been on the show have all said that that test was never designed
to be a standalone test to decide if someone should be a first responder or not.
What is your perspective?
It's not.
It wasn't designed to be the standalone test.
And it's really designed to give you a here and now of kind of like emotional space.
But really, it's designed to be with other tests in another space.
And so I mean, I don't know, to be honest, what was the reason that the states chose
to use that as the psychological test or the, you know, mental health test.
I'm not sure what the, you know, the reason was behind that.
But what I will say is that the people who are seeing the scores probably wasn't the
ones who should have been getting the scores.
So I wonder how many people really passed it or really didn't pass it because I can't
imagine someone without having that the proper background kind of scoring it and being like,
yeah, this person is good versus this person isn't.
So that's just what I think.
I think the process really should be, you know, meeting with someone face to face, kind
of having this kind of conversation, doing what I call a biopsychosocial, which is getting
a full history of, you know, childhood, where you are now, how you handle things now, why
you're in this field.
I think having something like that would do a little bit better job at vetting versus,
you know, someone having taken this test that isn't going to tell someone who doesn't know
how to score it much.
Absolutely.
Yeah, it's funny because I did the polygraph three of the four and had to line my way through
with those because that's just smoke and mirrors and magic show.
It's not anything that's actually, you know, true science.
And then the is funny when I wrote my second book and just came out last year and there's
one chapter and it's totally based on my experience in Orange County with that face to face counselor.
Literally it was like a pack rat's office.
She had to move papers off the couch for me to even sit down and I'm just sitting there
going and I'm being psychologically evaluated, you know, so this is the problem is, you know,
lowest bid and all that, even the face to face, who is that person that's actually vetting
that young candidate?
Do they have the ability to actually determine if they would be a good cop firefighter, paramedic,
or are they battling their own demons and maybe should go see some counseling first?
Yeah.
Or even if they have experience with working with these people or have experiencing understanding
what it means to be a firefighter, police officer, EMS, you know, like any of these
different disciplines, I think that's important as well.
You don't want to have someone who spent their life being a therapist for divorced couples,
right?
Marriage counseling is great.
That's perfect.
There's a lane for that, but I wouldn't necessarily pull that person in to work with my police
officer or firefighter because that person doesn't have the experience needed to work
with that type of client as well.
So I think a lot goes into that and I mean, we know, you know, cities and departments
have to do what they can do with the money that they're given, but I think if you want
to have healthier members who are making it to their 25 and out, 30 and out, and then
thriving in retirement as well, you have to do your due diligence when you're bringing
in people to be a part of like these systems for hiring, these systems for your EAPs and
things like that.
It's super important.
Absolutely.
Well, going back to Mike and Jeff, when we're talking about recruitment and the comparison,
because this whole thing is just to show, you know, show the lens of where we were,
where we are now, what went wrong, what can we change?
But I haven't had a person yet that said anything other than our recruitment is, is, you know,
pales in comparison to how it used to be.
When you look at not only your recruitment, but retention in your departments, what has
changed versus 20 years ago when arguably I would imagine most people will go in full
career and then taking their pension?
Well, you can start.
Yeah, I think the number one thing is when I got hired, my assistant chief, I remembered
his name was Ray Riggs.
He shook my hand and said, welcome to do the best job in the world.
And he meant it in the fact of you had this good paying job that was reliable that you
were going to have fun with.
You were literally going to have fun with.
Yes.
Is there a dangerous aspect?
Absolutely.
But you're going to have a good time, right?
That was the whole it's going to be fun.
You got with your buddies, you get to help people you do.
And then, you know, fast forward, you know, that's 2004.
And then probably within 10 years, you're starting to see cracks.
And I don't know if that's my the seven to 10 year itch you see on some guys when they
feel ignored in the department and they're not being utilized enough for something this
or that.
But then after a while, when we eventually got a two tier system because the economics
of our department completely changed, all of a sudden we have two different contracts
and another one doesn't look as appealing to do your whole 25 to 30.
So two being just fire or just EMS?
No, two tier being one contract.
If you got hired before this day in a whole different contract, if you got hired after
this day.
Gotcha.
So we're talking a difference in health care, a difference in retirement, you know, all
the different things.
Mostly a decrease.
None of it's an increase.
None of it's better.
The new tier was always a decrease of that because of the legacy costs, yada, yada, yada,
which really speaks to the inability to manage finances at a municipal level on many different
fronts.
That's a whole different conversation.
So the bottom tier, though, they run less calls and get more time.
Oh, they don't.
They do the same exact job for worse money.
Same exact job.
Sometimes doing more in a sense and then sometimes doing less depending on the scope of their
abilities.
Yeah, I think another part of it is and this is not just here, I think it's fire service
in general.
A lot of places it's turned into a business.
It's not, you know, we start looking at the chiefs have become managers of a business.
Yeah.
Whereas before it was the it was kind of the old, you know, this was a career.
This was a certain type of career that you did.
And you know, it's I think some of it has turned more towards that.
And the focus is more on, you know, budget lines and how much does this cost and, you
know, that versus this.
Whereas before, you know, you needed something.
Boom, you got it.
Yeah, there wasn't the budget constraints and those types of things.
You didn't necessarily you didn't feel like a number.
And, you know, you actually felt like a member of the department.
Whereas over the years, because of budgets and, you know, taking benefits and all this
other stuff, you really kind of started a lot of people started feeling a lot less.
Like I'm just a number on a budget.
The do more with less became like our mantra.
It's just like how much more we do more with less while you're giving me death by a thousand
cuts at the same time.
See what's so interesting.
And I had Tulsi Gabbard on the show and we talked about this.
I am not an intelligent man.
I never rose above the rank of firefighter.
And yet it seems so painfully obvious to me that there is a false economy in so many things
that we see, especially in the fire.
So even nationally, we could have a national health care system if we focused on getting
Americans healthy, then it wouldn't cost us a lot.
But if, as we touched on the beginning of the interview, you know, obesity is normalized
and so is type two diabetes and all the other things.
And our kids are being served crap in schools and P.E. is being cut.
And you know, urban kids don't even have anywhere to exercise because if there is a place, it's
probably ridden with gangs and, you know, all these things that are fixable and reversible.
Then, you know, that, of course, you know, health care is going to become hard to to
fund in the fire service.
What I see is when when people and I love it when they say we're a business because
we're not we're a service, you know, and the job hasn't changed.
That was my sarcastic comment with the two tier.
The job is the job.
Your call comes in, you get on the rig, you respond fire extrication, rope rescue, you
know, EMS, whatever it is, jack of all trades, master of none.
And that is what we all signed up for.
That's what we train for in the academy.
The working environment under which we work is a completely different conversation.
And you know, as one of my friends actually in your area pointed out, you know, when you've
got one department that works 56 hours a week, another one that works 42, like a lot of the
northeast, you're basically telling them you're worth one third less than Boston.
Same job, you know, same calls.
But you you don't deserve to have what they have.
And so when you look at even the corporate space is what makes me laugh when people say
we're a business.
Well, if you look at the progressive business leaders, they invest in their people.
Look at the Googles and virgins and all these high level businesses.
A lot of the corporations now are going to four day work weeks, four, nine hour day work
weeks, finding the same productivity, more innovation, efficiency and a happier workforce.
So if we truly are a business, as I always say snarkily, then why are we modeling an
Indonesian sweatshop instead of a progressive business?
If you're a real business leader, you would be looking at investing in your people.
And the result of poor investment costs 10 times more in workman's comp claims, lawsuits
from accidents over time.
You know, the line of duty death payments, medical retirements, I could go on and on
and on.
So the money is there.
This is what drives me crazy.
It's just the leadership isn't.
Yeah, we had it.
And you know, to Jess point, we were talking about, you know, we're doing more with less.
People are getting burnt out in the career.
You know, I mean, there's you just get burnt out.
It takes years off your career when you're running short.
The calls aren't going to stop coming in, but you're doing more with less.
And people are starting to look at the career like, why am I doing this?
So when we started and you said, Hey, do you love your job?
You tear up.
Yeah, dude, good luck getting a job.
Now I've literally seen professional firefighters talk kids out of becoming firefighters.
Talk them out of it.
Like you're not gonna like it.
This is that the other thing they're going to do this.
They're going to do that.
Go be a welder.
Go be an electrician.
Go do this.
You own your own life.
They're literally telling them to go away.
I just shared an article on the New York Times, New York Times article, excuse me.
And it was saying that Gen Z are actually turning to trades because you got to remember,
this is a generation raised on information.
This is why we have a recruitment crisis.
When the three of us were going, I want to be a firefighter.
We're just thinking about cats and trees, so he faces and the front page holding a baby.
Now fast forward 20 years.
Now these young people who are much more in tune and kudos to our generation for finally
dragging this mental health conversation out into the open.
So our children are being raised with CrossFit and Spartan races.
So the physicality, the fit ones are extremely fit.
There's mental health conversations.
The leaning back into the value of relationships and family.
And so then that same lens goes and looks at Detroit, Orange County, whoever it is,
and they're like, oh, 56 hours a week, mandatory overtime makes it 80 hours a week.
Salary is only this.
The pension used to be good, but the governor cut it.
So now it's only here.
And then they look at welding or working for Amazon or whatever.
And they're like, I want to serve, but that just sounds awful.
So I'm going to go do this.
So what's crazy is we have a young group of people that would be phenomenal firefighters,
dispatchers, whatever the gig.
We need to now fix what's broken in the working environment so that we can once again have
hundreds, if not thousands of people lining up.
Because as all my special forces guests say, when they're overseas, we're the ones protecting
their family and they hold us to that same level.
A lot of people try and be Navy SEALs and SAS and Delta.
And that's because they want to find the best of the best.
If we're taking anyone 18 and a heartbeat, imagine the catastrophic events that would
happen with that lower bar.
God forbid you have a 10 story high rise fire or a school shooting.
And as we saw, sadly, in a valley, your child dies because you allowed some politician or
cowardly leader break down your department.
So as I said, being optimistic as I am, this crisis is the perfect opportunity to finally
turn it around, because if we don't change it, you know, Detroit might not have a fire
department.
Orlando might not have a fire department.
So we can turn tragedy into triumph, follow the city of Detroit with the fire departments.
And then you guys are thriving and able to deliver a level of service that matches the
pendulum swing in the city itself.
Yeah.
And Detroit's its own thing compared to, you know, Mike and I are working in the suburbs
of Detroit, right?
You know, the city is one thing, the suburbs are a whole other.
And then getting a lot of these municipalities to work and sync together to help each other
out as well as a part of it.
Absolutely.
Manisha, you want to jump in with anything?
I've just been yapping for a moment.
No, you guys are right on the mark.
I just think that there's a lot of things that we can't control, which makes it harder
for all of us working in a field of service and a field of wanting to be there for the
people that we serve.
And so I think understanding that there's things that we can't control, there's people
that we can't control and entities that we can't.
I think that's where our compassion is and where it's important to have a great, a good
leader, a strong leader, someone who has great listening skills and communication skills
and who's able to have 360 perspective on what could be happening with their members
or what's happening in the community.
Because unfortunately, it's not going to be our politicians and our governments that saves
cities and states and neighborhoods.
It's going to be its people.
So I think the more that we do the training and we give compassion and grace to people
who actually do want to serve versus it being a business, we'll be good.
We'll be good.
It's definitely a fight that I'm willing to do that.
Me too.
I always tell people, you know, we used to send kids up chimneys and work in factories
in Victorian times until people said enough is enough.
You know, women couldn't vote until the suffragettes bound together, you know, the million man
march.
These events where people got angry enough, it doesn't mean you have to use violence,
but they got angry enough to want to step up.
All of a sudden, that one leader, that politician, that president, that union president, that
you know, fire chief, whoever it is, whatever that obstruction is, if there's enough of
us, you just run right over them.
So you know, to me, I always tell people I want to get them educated and angry.
Once you understand that there is a solution, even financially, and you can illustrate,
you know, like the question always asked, why do you not deserve to go home to your
family after 42 hours?
You know, and you literally save lives.
You come from a dead sleep to getting on a rig to doing a primary search, to then working
a cardiac algorithm.
And my barista stops at 40 hours, you know, and I love my coffee.
But you know, there is such an inequity there that we have to fix.
And until our own people understand that it's not macho to work yourself into a grave, then
hopefully we can bind together as a truly united fire service and start demanding a
work week because isn't that what a union is supposed to do fundamentally?
The very first thing is work week, working conditions.
So yeah, that's what I'd love to see.
So all right.
Well, Manisha, with you, we haven't got your background yet.
So tell me where you were born, family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
Gotcha.
Okay.
So I was born in the absolute best city in the state of Michigan, which is Ann Arbor.
And those who know anything about Ann Arbor, that is where the University of Michigan is.
And so yes, we are the state champs for 2023.
So everything is football in this area.
And yes, we are the Red Red Lions are doing well.
So born in Ann Arbor, my mother is actually from the South.
So my mom moved to Michigan when her family did a little bit when she was younger.
I think she was in high school.
My dad is also not from the state of Michigan.
He moved when his family moved for the auto industry.
I think he moved a little earlier before high school, so maybe elementary school.
But both of their families moved to Michigan for the opportunities that the auto industry
bought to the state of Michigan.
And so my family, they worked with Jim and Ford and Chrysler, and we are an automotive
family.
So my family and most of their close friends, we are living on the backs of the blood, sweat,
and tears of folks who've worked their lives in the automotive industry and built up this
amazing area and state to what it is today.
So I'm very proud about that.
My mom is nothing short of a Marvel superhero.
Just waiting for them to bring her into one of the movies, but she's amazing.
She worked her, I have three siblings, and my mom raised us pretty well and has done
all she could do to take care of us.
And my dad has done the same with some of the struggles that he has had, but I think
has done the best with what he can do.
And so I think it was pretty early on in my career that I, or in my childhood that I knew
I was going to be of some sort of service.
So it was going to be a couple of different things.
I wanted to be a dancer.
I was like, oh, I'm going to totally dance on one of these music videos.
And then I was like, I'm going to be an astronaut.
And then I was like, okay, I can't dance and I'm so afraid of heights, so that's not going
to work.
Let me go ahead and do something else.
And so I think I led towards social work because I lived a life where social workers were not
effective.
They came in and they made situations worse and they did not do the things that they were
supposed to do for family entities.
And so I looked into social work, but surprisingly enough, I didn't want to do this traditional
social work job.
So I realized that I wanted to do some sort of medical type of space.
So I found myself working with Wayne State pretty early on and got into trauma work.
So I've been a trauma therapist for, I'm just going to say quite a few years.
I'm not even going to put the number on it because it makes me feel old.
And so being a trauma therapist is hard.
Deciding to honestly work with people who are some of the toughest to work with, people
who have pretty complex medical conditions.
And I will just say that having depression, anxiety, PTSD, trauma from childhood, all
of that is a medical condition just as you would with diabetes or anything else.
And so I found myself not being able to shy away from people who needed the help the most
when a lot of my colleagues were like, yeah, I'm just going to stick to mild to moderate
cases or stick with families or stick with childhood and all of that has its lane.
But I think that for me, working with the folks who needed it the most was the challenge
and honestly my calling.
So I went that way and was blessed to have an amazing, to start to work with Wayne State
and Wayne Health and have an amazing team that I work with and a medical director who
doesn't allow me not to be my best at any given time.
And so when Frontline Strong together came about, it was an opportunity that a lot of
people wanted, but me because I had first responders in my family and I've seen the
side effects.
I am a child of military and first responder members in that family and it's not a pretty
picture when you see unresolved trauma, unresolved PTSD, people who refuse to get help for addiction
and things like that, that plays out and spills onto your family and it bleeds.
And so yeah, I was good.
I was good on that until I was convinced by my own family and that this might be a calling.
And I haven't looked back since, so I am blessed to do the work that I do with the people that
I do it with.
And I'm so honored to work with Jeff and Mike and these guys.
I don't know.
I'm just happy.
That's a different leap.
You went from doing clinical work to getting into FST-5.
That's a whole different thing.
Yeah.
So I went from doing a trauma therapist schedule.
I was working at some other programs and helping start and train other trauma therapists at
one point.
But yeah, I went from having 20 patients a day, not really, but having quite a few patients
working over the 40 hours a week with trauma patients to having state come and say, hey,
you guys need to develop and start this program and you need to do it from the ground up and
you need to learn all the best practices and do all the things and then also implement
your own expertise.
And yeah, you need to do it.
Make it work for all five of the disciplines at the same time.
Yeah, make it work for all five disciplines and do other things.
So it was not easy.
It has not been easy.
Every day is still kind of like we're still working through all of the, you know, the
twists and turns, the intricacies that make us who we are with all these five disciplines.
And I'm actually really happy that I said yes and I'm here and we're doing this work.
So it's not pretty.
It's not sexy work.
And it's not even rewarding work all the time, to be honest.
But it's work that builds up my community, which builds up my city, which builds up my
state, which means I'm leaving a legacy and that's all I want to do.
Well, I want to go back first when we're speaking of trauma, is it killing you that Ohio State
is going to the championships now?
It is.
And we own them four years in a row, baby.
That's all that matters now.
The trauma of it all.
And then even more so trauma where I have these people who are like, oh, but they're
the Big Ten.
And I'm like, don't talk to me.
I don't want to hear it.
Yeah, don't worry about it.
Michigan's putting more money in their players now.
We're good.
Yes.
So since I know a lot of people will see this podcast, I am for the Big Ten.
It will be a good national championship game.
My wife's an OSU fan, so I watched the last two.
The only time I ever watched American football.
I don't normally follow people throwing eggs around the field, but.
Your wife knows exactly what I was saying when I was born in the US.
She was still guided that they lost to Michigan.
So even though they're in this point now, I think that's cool.
So that's the man right there.
Bottom line is that, you know, rain day, if you don't win this national championship,
the fact that he hasn't beat us, I don't know.
All right.
Well, then before we go back to the lads, just kind of building on your own story, as
I progress through this podcast over the years, obviously I am a perpetual student and then
these kind of middle of the Venn diagram starts to show very, very powerfully the impact of
our youth on the first responder is rarely discussed.
It is in your profession, but overall in our profession.
Talk to me about the magnitude of the impact of, you know, year zero, even in vitro up
to when we get the badge pinned on our chest, because one of the biggest mistakes, I think
that some of the voices out there are saying is, oh, well, you were at the World Trade
Center or you were the Boston Marathon bombing.
That's why you're struggling.
And yet you hear the stories of so many first responders and military members and you're
like, oh, yeah, there's so much there.
And if that wasn't addressed before you entered the job, doesn't mean you shouldn't be.
But you know, I think we're left unaddressed is a dangerous thing.
So talk to me about the prevalence of childhood trauma in the people that you counsel now.
Absolutely.
I would say 90% of the first responders that come into this work have some sort of childhood
trauma, and that does not make them actually a bad first responder.
And I know that there's this negative connotation that comes with that and then also stigma
that comes with that.
The reality is, is that the difference between the first responders who have childhood trauma
and do well is that they have acknowledged it and they're getting work for it.
And the person who hasn't acknowledged it is someone who could be struggling.
And so I think it's important to understand that sometimes this work, the push to get
into the first responder field as a firefighter, as a police officer, is because people are
looking for an outlet.
They're running from something.
They're trying to get away from something sometimes.
And being a hero or being someone who loves adrenaline, who wants to show people and maybe
even others in the families that they're worthy, they can get into these types of fields and
not understanding not only what the field is going to bring, but also not understanding
that you don't necessarily, because healing is an ongoing process.
So you don't have to be healed to get into any space.
But if you don't even address some of the things that have happened in your childhood,
just as a therapist, you're going to find yourself struggling and not being able to.
So like the person that you mentioned before who had clutter everywhere, she was struggling.
That person may have just been kind of like head above the water trying to figure out
their space and what they're doing.
And we see this in both spaces of where it's just not becoming okay to talk about these
things.
Most departments, most first responder worlds were like, you don't talk about what's wrong
with you.
You deal with that later.
Even in the military, you should be able to handle these things.
You should be able to do the thing, only the strongest survive.
And then they kick you out of these systems.
So like, so you're no longer a firefighter, you're no longer a police officer, you're
no longer Delta, Navy, like all these other, you know, these high ranking services, and
they expect you to survive in the everyday world.
And you don't know how to do so.
And so I think that it is important.
I love that we're in a space where we can talk more about mental health, but that won't
be enough until we can just reduce or eliminate the stigma because people don't, most people
don't know that it doesn't, it didn't start with you coming into the work that you're
doing.
Most of it started before that.
So yeah, it's tough.
It's weird.
That's the biggest thing I think I've learned entering this world because I have zero education
and training in any type of psychology, psychiatry, peer support, I'm like the podcast producer
dude who also has a lot of teaching time in the general sense of fire and EMS.
But I've learned the most is that first of all, especially our younger generations, because
they're younger, come in not knowing they've been affected throughout their life.
Certainly the younger humans in 2025 are much more self-aware because we talk about it more.
They're growing up in a culture where you should say, yeah, I don't like this.
Something's weird with me right now.
Whereas you would have stuffed that away a long time ago.
So when we talk to people that are quote having troubles, you're right.
We see the, not the general public's like, oh, you must have seen so much.
It's like, well, I had all this stuff happening to me before I got there and it's been exacerbated
by this lifestyle, this job.
And not only is the job hard, but it goes on 56 hours a week.
I have a stay at home wife.
I got two kids.
I got to work another job to keep things going and, and, and, and, and like everybody else.
And then I get that little extra click of the reality of I get to see four people's
worst day of their life before I've had lunch that day.
Yeah.
It's a lot of that.
I think that's, I think you hit the nail on the head.
I think the public just worth it.
It's a lot of the calls we go on, but they don't realize we all have a life at eight
o'clock when shift ends and that life comes with life, life, goods and bads, traumas,
good things, bad things, whatever it might be.
And the next day when I show up, I have to tuck all that stuff away and now I'm dealing
with your problems and then you're up all night.
Yes.
So I think it's one of those things where it's, it, it, there's a culmination of a lot
of things that go into the trauma that first responders really deal with is it's not one,
there's not one road.
There's a lot of paths that leave that lead to it.
The trauma is a bucket and it accepts many different forms or backpack.
To be honest, a lot of the stuff that, that we deal with on the peer support stuff isn't
work stuff.
Yeah.
A lot of the stuff we deal with, with the peer support team is life.
Yeah.
The exacerbation of life around the hard job.
Yeah.
But you can't be home enough so that you're having a problem with your wife or your kids
are sick and you still have to be at work and, and, and, and, and, and.
How often is the prevalence of mandatory overtime for you?
Yeah.
Depends on the department.
Depending on, especially like our, what you see at the most is dispatchers and private
EMS right now are just like, we talk to private EMS people that come to my department and
we've had a few youngers and they're like, yeah, I'm used to working the same amount
of hours and making half the amount, blah, blah, blah.
But they're not telling you is they're supposed to work 36 hours a week, 40 hours a week and
they're getting mandatory up to 60 hours a week.
That's insane.
Dispatchers are real.
And dispatchers are just like, not only in my eight hour shift where they answer the
call literally 500 times, how am I going to need you to stick around another four and
then I need you to come back eight hours later.
Yeah.
I don't think this is, this is the thing as well.
I mean, I live this 56 hours a week, which, you know, I think you guys are familiar.
I think we talked about this when I was on your show, but in itself is insanity as we
touched on earlier.
Why is it not 40 hours a week like everyone else?
But then to have to phone your wife, your husband and, you know, tell your kids, Hey,
I can't come to Dan for donuts.
I've done nothing wrong.
I've just, my management is so shit that once again, rather than filling these gaps with
new firefighters, we're relying on us.
The analogy I use is that log PT that you see in, you know, buds in the seal training,
you know, you're supposed to have eight men on that log and now there's seven, now there's
six, you know, and you're still carrying it.
So every time that someone's gone, you're having to work more and more and the impact
on the relationships and the shame and guilt that comes with that, you know, that's just
compounding it.
And what drives me crazy is that the people that make these decisions, they go home at
five o'clock Monday to Friday.
It doesn't affect them.
So out of sight, out of mind.
And I think that is completely disgusting because not only is it our first responders
lives, it's their relationships.
And even if you look at the science, the health of their offspring is affected.
We have a much higher prevalence of pediatric cancers and Down syndrome and autism.
So you know, this is so, so needed that we look at the work week because I mean, I'll
get Manisha's perspective in a second, but I haven't had a person yet tell me anything
other than sleep deprivation is directly related to insert all mental ill health, addiction
and anxiety, depression, suicide ideation, all the things.
So the evidence is all there, like we said.
And if we're not fixing the root pillar of human health, which is sleep, then we're scratching
at the surface.
If we just put an EAP piece of paper on the board and say, well, that's mental health
fixed.
Absolutely.
Sleep is sleep is ground zero.
You have to be able to be in a space where you're getting healthy sleep.
And I think that's probably the number one thing that all five of our disciplines are
struggling with is sleep.
And it leads into so many other things because your brain isn't able to properly to work
properly work without being able to.
We push it now because our brains are supercomputers.
We push them and they're able to do these magical things.
Right.
So you take that two hour nap, you're like, oh, okay, that's good.
That's all I need.
I'm going to go for another 16 hours.
At some point, you're going to not be able to do that anymore.
At some point, you're going to break down and you're going to stop.
And so something as simple as like getting more sleep or just getting better sleep, you
know, understanding your sleep hygiene and how do you get the most sound sleep whenever
you can can make a world of difference for our first responders and their families.
But you're absolutely right.
The first responder world does not just affect the first responder.
It bleeds on its families.
It bleeds on the children and everyone else around them.
And so when we got into the space of creating this program, we wanted to make sure we included
that.
And it's super important to be able to make sure this program also covered spouses, children,
anyone else who's a close member to our first responders because they have to go home.
Right.
They the stress, the trauma, the first one of the first times I met Mike, I think this
is before he played a really bad trick on me.
But one of the first times I met Mike is that he told me he said most people in their lives
only get that one worst day of your life.
Right.
You only get one like I can't believe this happened.
Worst day of your life.
And people spend their lifetime working through that.
Firefighters and first responders go through 20, 25 worst days of people's lives in a shift
and a shift.
And you times that by how long somebody has been in service and then them needing to go
home to their spouses and to their families.
And then that's just putting that in that box.
But then what happened?
What has this person been through before they even got into the service?
What is buried so low at the bottom before they even got to the service?
For the first, the capacity of emotional kind of separation and kind of mentally blocking
out certain things is top notch for first responders.
But it's also the key thing that's making life outside of the work unbearable.
So that's why we're seeing high numbers of suicide later in the service years, soon after
retirement, or once people are realizing that they can't do what they did in the first couple
years, not being able to hold their anger, not being able to hold their alcohol, not
being able to do, you know, just brush things off their shoulders like they once before.
Now they're in a space where they don't have a capacity to even learn a skill to be able
to, you know, get themselves back to a safe and a healthy state of emotional regulation.
And so the goal is to try to help people before it becomes too hard, before it becomes too
late.
In the state of Michigan, last November, so just a few months ago, was the, in the month
of November, we lost, I think it was a total of six, Mike?
Participants in suicide?
Six confirmed.
Yep, six confirmed.
And so the highest that we've ever had in the state, the most that we've had in that
in one month, and the reasons that we learned were all things that had someone had an opportunity
to process probably years before it would have, I think they would have been okay to
be able to make it through the kind of the straw that broke the camel's back in that
space.
So it's real, the struggle of not being able to handle things because you were taught how
to handle them improperly.
It's real, and it's super hard for our first responders.
Absolutely.
Well, Mike, I want to get to kind of your journey through the mental health lens, and
then we'll get to how you all came together.
So as you progressed through your career, were there any personal struggles that led
you into this?
And then if not, what was your path into peer support, CISM, and then ultimately this?
I think there was, yeah, I mean, there was a ton of struggles, actually.
I mean, one of them was being how young I first started in all this.
I started, I was an EMT when I was 18, got my medic when I was 19, and you're dealing
with stuff, you know, your brain isn't even formed yet completely.
And coming in at that time, it was the old school mentality of you keep your mouth shut,
you don't talk about it.
And here I am 19 years old, and I'm in a world with 30, 40, 50 year olds.
Not in Mayberry.
You weren't working in Mayberry.
He was working in a busy spot.
And you're looking to them to see how do I do this?
You know what I mean?
And you see that you kind of keep your mouth shut, you move on.
But going through, I remember 19, 20 years old having dead infants, dead kids, you know,
and not really knowing what to do with that.
Because 18, 19 years old, 20 years old, my friends, I had no, none of my friends understood
what I did.
They were going to college, they were going to college parties, they were doing these,
you know, this, that, and the other.
And it was hard to talk to them about it, because there was no realm of they could not
understand that kind of stuff.
Right?
You know, moving through that even, I remember, you know, back in 2015, my dad was diagnosed
with leukemia.
We almost lost him a couple times.
And then, so going through that journey with him and seeing, you know, how that affected
him.
If I wasn't at work, I was downtown, he was inpatient, getting chemo, you know, kind of
seeing how that process goes.
And you're in, you're on a floor with all people who are going through chemo.
And you know, if I wasn't at work, I was up there with him.
And you know, you come to the realization that your parents aren't going to be around
forever.
And it's a hard pill to swallow.
But same deal, you know, no idea how to talk about it.
Right?
So, 2017 is when I had a run that really, really screwed me up.
It was a, I had a son back in 2015 as well.
And he was born with a cleft lip and palate.
So his first year, I mean, we were, we had two major surgeries to repair his cleft lip
and palate.
He was on oxygen, he had an NG tube.
I mean, we basically slept next to him with a BVM in case he stopped breathing.
Multiple trips to the neonatal intensive care unit for failure to thrive.
So I mean, that first year was, you know, I just got through the leukemia with my dad.
Then that happens.
Then I have 2017, I had a run where a little girl, same age as my son, floating in a swimming
pool.
And that one was the one that got me.
Like the other ones, you know, we've had other ones, but that was the one that was like,
you know, we talked about, that was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back.
And it was one of those things where I knew it got me more than the other runs per se.
There's five of us on the run.
Nobody ever talked about it.
I actually talk about it pretty freely now, but you know, they had a clinician come in
and talk to us.
And this dude comes in, you know, it's a low bid EAP, no idea what we do, comes in, turns
his chair around.
So he's going to sit like a cool guy and talk to me.
And I, you know, I start explaining the situation and he looks at me.
I mean, we're probably five minutes into this conversation.
And he looks at me and goes, yeah, man, I totally understand.
And at that point, I, I shot a die, stood up.
I'm like, Hey, thanks for your time.
You know, there's no way you can understand pulling a kid out of a swimming pool, you
know, the same size as your son, the same age.
There's no way, right?
And that's all we had.
That was it.
You know, and I look around and see these other guys, they're, you know, they act, they
seem like they were okay.
Right.
So now I'm starting to think, all right, well, what's wrong with me?
Why is this getting me type deal?
And didn't go to talk to anybody about it.
Things started progressing, you know, you can't sleep.
So then you start pouring some drinks, that type of thing took me down.
I mean, a really, really dark path pretty quickly actually.
And you know, eventually it was, it was to a point where, you know, you had the suicidal
ideations and things like that.
And it got to the point where it was like, all right, I need, I do need to go get help.
And so then, then we move on to the stress of trying to find a clinician.
Right.
So I go see my first lady, I go see, and I made that lady cry.
I'm handing her, I'm handing her the Kleenex box, like, Hey, you know, it's going to be
all right, you know, type thing, you know, looking like, do I get my money back here?
Because like, you know, I'm counseling you now.
You know, we have, then I had another guy who just wanted nothing but war stories, you
know, and finally on the fourth try, I found my person, you know, we connected, it was
something that the personalities connected.
And she really helped me through a lot of that stuff.
And it was, it was a lot, it wasn't just that run, but it was unpacking a lot of that stuff
to happen also, because it was all within years of each other.
But I do remember sitting in her office one time, it was, it was pretty early on around
when peer support started becoming a thing with the IFF.
And she asked me, she goes, well, what about, you know, if you talk to other firefighters
about your, your struggles and stuff, I started laughing at her.
I said, that'll never happen.
I go, they'll laugh me out of the building.
Right.
And she goes, you know, what, why, why can't you do that?
I go, because we don't do that, that the stigma that's attached to it, but you know, that
type of deal.
And I remember leaving that office and it was one of those things where like, I knew
the system was screwed up because I knew a lot of dudes who were like me.
And I remember driving one day, I was riding Ashley the rescue with the same guy who was
on that run with me.
And he looked at me and said, he told me he was going to see a therapist over that run.
And I looked at him and it felt like 3000 pounds were taken off my, my shoulders because
I wasn't the only person who had problems with it.
You didn't feel alone.
You know what I mean?
You had like the self-imposed weight in your backpack.
Yes.
Right.
Because you didn't know you could share that weight.
Yes.
And you know, him and I are talking about it and it made me feel a lot better.
So then it started kind of like, okay, maybe there is something to this peer support stuff,
you know?
And I told myself, I'm not a huge like religious guy, but I told myself, I go, if this is something
that I'm supposed to do, there'll be a sign.
Right.
And I remember sitting at a union meeting probably six months later and our delegation
had come back from the IFF convention and this is when peer support was just getting
started.
And I remember at the union meeting, they're like, hey, you know, we heard about this peer
support stuff.
Is there, you know, we're wondering if anybody would want to start it.
And I remember sitting in the meeting and it was like that, oh, you know, like, that's
it.
It's like, there's your sign.
You know what I mean?
And so it was one of those things where it was like, okay, this is what I've been looking
for.
This is the sign I was kind of looking for.
And so I raised my hand and said, you know, I'll start it.
I'll do it.
And we started our program with 12 individuals and it's been going on now for seven years.
It was something that we grew from the bottom up, grassroots.
I mean, it was boots on the ground.
That's where we started.
And a lot of it, you know, the team that I had around me is really what made it happen.
I can't say enough about the team.
And from there, it really grew because we just started, we had a real honest conversation
about what were all the barriers that we ran into to getting help for mental health.
And we just started checking them off.
Okay, how do we fix this?
How do we fix this?
It was like you talked about when enough people had enough of whatever's going on.
All right, if you're not going to fix it, then we are.
And that's really kind of how our peer team made ourselves what we are today is just that.
We see the system's broke.
We know it's not going to get any better.
So we're going to make it better.
You know, from there, I mean, I still go to therapy today.
I still go to therapy once a week and see the same therapist.
But you know, since then, there's other things.
My dad got leukemia again, which he's in remission from that, but then got a different type of
cancer, been through a divorce.
But because of those things, when these things happened, I was set up for success.
I wasn't set up for failure.
And so it's really kind of building that resiliency that has helped move that kind of journey
along.
And that's when the MPFFU started a behavioral health committee for all of Michigan.
Hey, I'll join that.
I remember seeing, and that's actually how I met Jeff, was they were doing a.
Yeah, I'm like a podcast nerd.
So like when I've gotten education years and years ago, I got good at, I guess, digital
media in a sense.
I mean, it's 2020 something, right?
You're going to be good at digital media.
So I've been doing videos and audio for over 10 years.
And then I got into the podcast game when a group I was working for needed to get information
out about the pandemic to over 4,000 of our paramedics.
And then the Michigan Professional Firefighters Union, which is our state representation of
the IFF said, hey, you want to do a podcast with us?
Yes, let's do it.
And then I kind of became a podcast guy doing a bunch of them.
And then Mike hit me up like, hey, what do you think about doing one about mental health
for this frontline strong another five program?
And I'm like, sure, I don't know anything about it.
I'm probably need that too.
We should probably talk.
So and then he introduced me to Manisha.
And that's when my education really started.
Mike kind of opened up to me about his story.
And then he's talking and then I'm being flooded with all my memories.
Like, huh, I wonder how much of my personality has been affected by not only my my growing
up, but also growing up in the fire service.
Because like Mike, I started at 19.
Right.
I was real young, just like him.
And you start to see these things in a broader perspective.
And then you start playing all the stories in your head, like the thousands of conversations
I've heard around a firehouse where guys talk and I'm like, this guy's going through a divorce.
This guy's got cancer.
This other one lost a father.
This other one did it.
And you start seeing all these instances and remembering all these times when somebody
needed not just a shoulder, they needed resilience and they needed a community around them to
build it and make sure they knew what that was on day one.
So that the backpack we carry that we're putting in rocks, rocks and every day, we're offloading
that thing on a regular basis.
We're not breaking the straps off.
So that's a big.
Yeah.
For so many years, it was nobody wanted to talk about mental health because it was the
elephant in the room.
You know what I mean?
And you couldn't with anybody make it funny.
Even the people that needed it were the ones making fun of you.
Yes.
Let's be honest.
Absolutely.
And we thought we were going to get laughed out.
We thought we were going to get laughed out of the fire service.
And within our first year, we had over three or 400 contacts.
What year was this?
This was probably 2019 is when we started it.
And since then, we haven't had a year yet where we've had under 350 to 400 contacts.
And how many people you service in there?
That's your department, correct?
No, that's all departments in Southeast Michigan.
OK.
Yeah.
Because you guys are handy.
Yeah.
So Mike's done a great job of like leading the way of building this non-official network
in a lot of ways.
Official non-official, right?
Yeah.
And really how it started was we were all starting peer support teams at the same time.
And there was no years ago, there was no like, this is how you start a team.
Like this is how you do this.
There was no standardized anything.
So when you would run into another team, we would just network with each other.
Hey, what's working good with you guys?
What's working good with us?
And that's how we kind of built this network throughout the state of peer teams was, hey,
oh, you know what?
I like that idea.
I'm going to take that idea.
Oh, well, I like this idea from your team.
I'm going to take that idea.
And that's really how the kind of the genesis of how these teams came together happened.
And then when Frontline Strong came about, we never really had a centralized anything
for mental health support in the state.
That's where Frontline Strong came in.
And it was like this centralized force where we can organize under one umbrella.
And really-
On behalf of all the five-
All first responders.
And their immediate family members, because they're on the team too.
Yeah.
I'm getting mandatory overtime.
My wife's on the team that day.
You know what I mean?
She's taking care of the house or whoever else I need to be because I can't be there
that day.
Yeah.
Well, Benisha hit on a point that I think really needs to be the next phase when it
comes to talking about mental health and the fire service, which we talked about stigma
and 10 plus years ago, absolutely.
That was a pertinent conversation.
And we were calling everything PTSD.
And now fast forward to 2025, we understand PTSD versus moral injury.
We're talking about sleep deprivation, all these other things that need to be discussed.
Where I think we've fallen short, and this is obviously just nationally, is that we're
stuck on stigma.
Like I say, we've got the trouser legs stuck on stigma.
And we're not talking about post-traumatic growth and the hope that comes with that.
I truly believe that unaddressed childhood trauma becomes a fracture in the foundation.
But once it's addressed, once it's worked through, that becomes resilience.
I think that's truly the definition of resilience.
We have these classes and people are shouting and they're going through collapsed mazes
and stuff.
That's not resilience, in my opinion.
It's whatever you struggle with, whether you've addressed it before or whether you address
it today, that is really what makes you a great first responder because now you can
be more empathetic.
Now you have that strength.
You can deal with some of these calls that maybe would have challenged you before.
So talk to me about the formation of front running strong together.
And then let's talk about the barrier to entry because, I mean, for example, one huge one
is cost.
Another one is the availability of a culturally competent clinician.
So talk to me about the formation and what are these solutions that you're offering
the Michigan first responders and their families so they can work through these struggles and
become even better first responders, putting hope in this conversation.
Yeah, absolutely.
So I think it's about 2020 that we got word that frontline strong together was a go.
And so a little bit of background on how the program got started is we have some pretty
major heavy hitting unions.
So we worked with the POAM, which is the Police Officers Association of Michigan, and PFFU,
Michigan Professional Firefighters Union, and Fraternal Order of Police, which is FOP.
And so we had these folks with other lobbyists come and say, hey, we need to provide something
more than EAPs for our members.
So something more than just go to your EAP or go to talk to someone for disciplinary
actions.
We need to find something for actual mental health support and behavioral health support
because people are struggling.
And so we got this amazing grant that is funded by the state of Michigan that has tasked us
to offer services for police, firefighters, EMS, 911 dispatch, and corrections to all
83 counties in the state of Michigan, which is this is the first time anything like this
has ever been done.
And so when you get that thrown on your lap, and that's the only direction you get, you
kind of have to like get in and figure out where you go.
And so first thing we learned on the Wayne Health side, so we work with two different
entities here.
The 21st 7, 365 call center, which is also a space.
I know that there's 988 and there's other suicide prevention lines, but this is the
first time that the state has had its own first responder call line.
And so a call line where a first responder can call and say, hey, I'm struggling today.
I just need someone to talk to all the way to, hey, I've had to switch my schedule.
My wife's schedule hasn't changed.
We need to find evening daycare in our area.
Can you help us find it?
All those resources can be found on this line to make it even better.
It's manned by part-time and retired first responders.
So you're going to talk to a first responder as well.
And then also managed by people who have the same degrees as myself.
So like clinicians who can help within the crisis moment.
We can take calls all the way from suicide calls all the way again to something super
simple and just needing a resource.
And so that's 24-7-365 manned by a state program called MyCal and operated by a program in
Oakland County called Common Ground.
And they're pretty amazing.
And so that has been one of the things that have helped us because sometimes people just
need to find a call space.
But within that 24-7-365 crisis line, we found that peer support is the biggest thing.
A lot of people, once they hear mental health or behavioral health and the distinction between
the two in this program is that behavioral health really focuses on the addiction.
It focuses on substance, things like that, behavioral type things that need to change.
And so we kind of like to have that distinction because two reasons.
One, unfortunately, our insurances have got a hold of these words that are triggers.
And so what we will find is that insurance will say, we'll cover this amount of behavioral
health and this amount of mental health, but we won't cover them both in the same space.
And so we want people to understand that there is a distinction between the two.
And our goal is to make sure that we can help you find the right coverage that you need.
So that's important.
But peer support is huge.
So what we found is that it was important to identify who's doing what in all 83 counties
and have a central place on our website and within our phone call that our phone line
where people can call and say, I need to talk to someone who's in the same field as me,
who's not in the same department as me, but who can understand what I have going on.
Can you give me connect me with that person?
And you can either call our car line or our website and you can find a peer support network
within your area, within your zone.
Now Mike is fancy enough to where people just call him directly.
But we try to not have that be the burden of our individual members is to have people
calling them directly all the time.
So we encourage people to come to our website where they can find peer support, peer supporters
in their area.
But I think the single thing that makes our Clearinghouse, which is our website, so spectacular
is that we have a list of actively being updated of culturally competent clinicians.
Now this is important because as I mentioned earlier, you don't just want to send a first
responder to somebody who says, oh, I'm a trauma therapist or I'm a depression expert
and they have no experience working with a first responder.
They may be amazing at the work they do, but you have to understand the culture of working
with first responders.
And the beauty about this is that you can integrate yourself in that culture and you
can learn how to work with first responders, but you're not going to know it right off
the bat.
So we took our time learning this, kind of went through the wringer.
Mike and his team made me have my first panic attack ever because they tried to trap me
in a burning building.
Well, okay, so that's my trauma talking.
That's what happened in my mind.
That's my trauma talking.
But actually it was an experience I had to come through and I did some training with
the guys and actually with all five disciplines.
And that's one of the things that we promote is doing ride alongs, learning how to learn
more about the culture, learning more about your city and your county.
How are the municipalities servicing which areas in those areas so that you can understand?
Like, okay.
So people in the city, firefighters in the city of Detroit will have in a 24 hour shift
probably is going to have more cause than maybe city of Romeo, right?
So it's a smaller place, things like that, and actually see things, see a lot more things
and actually maybe even have a lot more fires.
And so understanding where the city in which the first responders you're trying to serve
is going to be huge.
Understanding the first responders that you're going to work with is going to be huge.
And then also understanding how, just like you mentioned, their childhoods kind of feed
into that space.
And that's going to be different than someone who has not had the same experiences.
That's going to be different than someone who's like, oh, I have childhood trauma, but
that isn't, you know, since then I've been okay.
I've been great.
I haven't seen anything significant, haven't ran into anything.
My family's doing good.
Everyone's healthy.
Guarantee you how you treat that person is going to be very different than how you treat
a firefighter.
And so that's just a few of the small things I think because I'm super excited about this
program that we do.
But I think those are, I think I've maybe covered some of the most important things
that we do outside of probably the most exciting thing we do, which is our podcast, because
it is the way that the people communicate with Frontline Strong Together, which is also
known as FSC5.
And so we'll make sure that we put contact information so that you guys can see and learn
more about the program.
But yeah, I'll let the guys talk about Mines on the Frontline because this is probably
this, including our webinar that we do, which is not as exciting, although it's going to
be in May 25th.
We do have a webinar as well.
But we found that our podcast and our webinars and our education trainings is the way that
people communicate with us, is the way that we learn as we're doing what people are struggling
with, what people need and adjusting in real time.
So this isn't a situation where we're like, oh, we have this and it's going to take us
years to create a new program.
No, people need help now.
So we're going to these places, we're talking to people in real time.
And then next month in two months, we've created a space where people can have a dialogue or
have access to a new treatment, a new training.
And that's the beauty of what we do.
So yeah.
Beautiful.
Yeah, it's been really, and again, underscoring the fact that my, you know, being a firefighter,
a medic for so long, but also an instructor, facilitator, seeing these things come together
where FST five has produced a giant network where they offer the big three.
Number one is the giant message of we need to decrease the stigma by talking to it and
just having each other.
You got to have a network, your literal social network, whether that's your friends, your
family, hopefully the non first responders in your life that you keep close to you so
they normalize you.
And then you also need access to peer supporters, people that have a little bit more training
on you and you got something going on.
And then you also need access to culturally competent clinicians and treatments that are
actually going to be beneficial to you.
And when you have a network of all of those working together for all five and their families,
we're seeing tremendous benefits.
Now we're still going to have problems.
This program is not going to fix them.
It's not designed to fix it.
It's designed to be a safety net for when the things we know we're going to happen,
the human beings that operate our systems and the human beings that maintain a healthy
life with those human beings, those frontline workers are going to break down at some point,
whether it's physical, financial or emotional.
And we have to be here to protect them and help them.
And one of the biggest benefits of frontline is bringing all this together increases the
scope, the end of the people that are working on it.
So that's the more people are being affected.
That's also more brains working on a problem.
It's more piles of things coming together to fix these things and to help a greater
cause.
And I think we're seeing Michigan, which is a very big state, got two parts, they got
an upper peninsula lower.
It's a pretty big state.
It's a big world, but it becomes a small world, but a big neighborhood where we're all like,
I feel like we're more in it together in Michigan, especially me learning from Frontline Strong
in the last two years.
And then doing the podcast and talking about so many people about the different things
is we're shrinking the problem by staring at it and dissolving the stigma and then making
people realize it's cool to admit you got something to work on.
And then here's who you should call and then let us help you with the price.
It's all the things.
Yeah.
Well, let me ask you quickly, because this is, I think, a big part of this conversation.
When people ask me, who approached me from companies, I want to help first responders.
Who's an organization that ties you all together?
And I'm like, no one.
And it's just the hard truth.
I wish that the union brought us all together and disseminated the information that we need
and had a unified, standardized professional work week, all those kind of things.
But we just don't.
I say honestly, there's chiefs organization and there's FDIC and all these things, but
we're still extremely siloed.
And I've having worked East Coast, West Coast and back to East again, arguably one of the
richest and one of the poorest departments, one of the best and one of the worst.
I'll leave everyone to kind of figure out which is which.
I got an interesting perspective of the fire service nationally.
And I realized that there's a lot of ego, a lot of narcissism.
Oh, well, city doesn't talk to county.
PD doesn't talk to FD, which again, insert Uvalde, lesson learned, make sure that you're
not one of those people.
But this is a barrier to growth, innovation, progress.
And like I said, the simple why do our firefighters work 56, the amount of pushback I get from
that, oh, it'll never happen.
Oh, you know, it's just justification of apathy rather than, you know, actually forging a
moral journey for your people and fixing some of these issues that are literally sending
you to funerals.
So what was it that was different in Michigan that brought all these these counties together
so that you could bring this as an actual statewide initiative?
Dr. A in a pile of money.
I mean, honestly, I had a big, huge brain and a guy with a lot of coal who can see the
future, man.
I mean, Dr. A is awesome.
I think that part of it, I think on the other part of it is as peer teams, we were already
kind of doing it a little bit.
We were already our own network.
You guys showed that the investment was worth the time.
Yes.
But but the problem we had seen years before that is we'd have programs like Frontline.
But then there was an agenda.
There was, you know what I mean?
Or a narcissist running in the way.
And they were kind of like flash in the pan things like they started out hot and heavy
and then they would fade out.
And we all kind of kept in touch with one another and had our own kind of network.
And we even had like mutual aid agreements.
You know what I mean?
You're going to get to your department, you're going to call me or those types of things.
So we had it, but we never had anything to bind us together or that centralized thing.
So when we saw Frontline strong come together with Dr. A and money and the right people.
And we saw that the one of the one of the biggest things that we saw with Frontline
was every program prior to that was clinicians telling us what we needed.
Okay, who had no idea what we did where Frontline started was tell us what you guys need.
They took the approach of we don't know what we don't know and we need you guys to teach
us.
Let's take our clinical world.
Let's take your first responder world.
Let's melt them together and then we'll get what we need.
And that's that was the difference with this program and why it works so well is that they
put their egos aside.
Right?
So we made ourselves vulnerable and said, hey, these are our problems.
This is what we need.
They made themselves vulnerable.
Hey, I don't know everything even though I got a doctor in front of my name.
And we sat down and had real conversations.
And sometimes they were uncomfortable conversations where, hey, we're going to do this.
And us as first responders looked at him and we're like, yeah, it's not going to work.
And you know, and they were smart enough to listen, but they were smart enough to listen.
And but vice versa, where we said, we want to do this and they come in and go, well,
that's not how this works.
We have to do it this way.
So it's a learning thing.
But that is really how this all came about was we had those.
We had certain things already in place.
We just didn't have the money.
We didn't have the resources.
We didn't have any of these things.
Whereas when frontline came in, it was a beautiful marriage between these two sides.
And it could have gone south real quick.
If you didn't have the right people running it, who didn't put the priority of seeking
to understand first, if that wasn't the priority, they would have come up with a plan of we're
going to do X, Y and Z that had dumped money in it.
A couple of events would have happened and it would have failed.
But they took the time to listen and say, OK, what is it you think you need?
What is going on?
What is actually affecting these humans?
Then they came up with a plan or a treatment plan essentially for the state.
And that's many should correct me if I'm wrong, but that's kind of what you do as a clinical
therapist is you listen, listen, listen, and then you come up with a treatment plan.
You don't just say, oh, oh, that hurts.
Do this.
Right.
You got it.
Yeah.
I definitely would say that.
How?
I mean, we we had to do something different.
So I think that we learned a lot from we are continuing to learn a lot from our guys.
It's painful, but
What's interesting is that, you know, we have a really good program.
We have all the best people and still will exist to where people don't even know about
it in Michigan.
We talk about this thing.
I work with people at a department that's only about 80 people and there's still people
there and I talk a lot that don't know about the program.
So I can only imagine.
Right.
And so there's all these people right now we're trying to reach to to make sure they
know they're not alone.
They're not.
And that's one of the big things about the podcast that we do.
So Minds on the Frontline is like this outreach arm, this beacon, this this this lighthouse
of hey, hey, come here.
Look, we have the information for we have some answers for you if you want them.
We're not forcing anything on you, but we want everybody to know with a giant megaphone
that they're not alone.
Absolutely.
I think that you're right.
I think that's one of the biggest things when we started this podcast.
That's what it was about.
It was for many years we didn't talk about this stuff.
And it takes people who have gone through some things to talk about it and have that
vulnerability to talk about it.
We have a lot of guests on here who have gone through some things.
You know, their parents have committed suicide or they they've gone through substance use
or they've gone through these things.
And it's a lot of them.
It's the first time they may have talked about it with anyone.
And if you can create that space that they feel safe enough to where they can have those
conversations and they can be human and be vulnerable, that's what I think we look at
is hopefully somebody who's listening to that podcast goes, wow, that sounds a lot like
me.
Like I'm not messed up.
Like I'm this.
This isn't something that that's, you know, a life sentence.
I can get through this type of stuff.
And, you know, it's it's been kind of kind of cool.
We've had a couple episodes where people have got a hold of us after the episode, especially
with the suicide episodes and said, hey, you know, I thought about killing myself back
in blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, I really appreciate your podcast, that type of thing.
And that was really, you know, one of the things that we talked about when we first
started this podcast was if we could if we could get one person to listen to it and still
be here, then this podcast was totally worth it.
And we've seen that tenfold.
So that's really the why we really started this was making it OK and having that arena
where people can listen to and go, OK, there's nothing wrong with me.
This is, you know, just a couple dummies with a mic.
Yeah, you know, nobody special.
A couple of dudes who've driven down the road.
Yeah, you know, and we're still here.
And you know, we and our guests are phenomenal who come on.
And that, I think, helps people as well as you have that vulnerability.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, just one more quick question before we wrap up.
So I know we're mindful of your time when it comes to barriers to entry.
One big one is simply even touched on insurance.
You know, the cost of a mental health counselor.
A lot of these people are out of network.
It's like one hundred and fifty dollars a session.
How are you addressing that issue?
So go ahead.
Do you want to start a little bit?
So there's a couple of different things.
Number one, we got to remember that not all frontline workers have insurance.
I know, right.
By the way.
Right, right, right.
So if you don't have insurance and you are a volunteer sheriff up north Michigan and
your primary job is in the whatever industry up there, you might not have the insurance
that covers this.
Oh, but I'm a frontline worker.
Yeah, you're a volunteer.
So you're still a frontline worker, but you don't have the means to access it.
Now you get somebody like me who's got the thirty dollar copay because I got great insurance
and I found somebody in network.
Thirty bucks still adds up once a week.
And let's say somebody else in my family needs it, too.
It gets real expensive.
So one of the things they're doing through Wayne Health is they're covering the copays
for you through the grant funding.
So now I can go to a very good culturally competent clinician that's from the system
that we're working with and go to them and eliminate the copay.
Fantastic.
And then there's a couple other options.
So there's also certain peer teams throughout the state that have started their own 501C3s
and get donations and their peer teams will actually help pay for people to go to treatment.
They do fundraisers, have a bank account, and that's what that bank account is for,
is to help first responders go to treatment.
And then one of the other things, you know, I've been a huge proponent is a lot of other
states have it is a mental health presumption bill where, you know, we have in Michigan,
we have a cancer presumption bill that says, hey, guess what?
If you're a first responder, guess what?
You're probably going to get cancer.
So we're going to pay for your treatment.
We know sleep deprivation, the schedule, the trauma, the whatever it may be.
None of us leave this this career how we walked into it because of these things.
And why isn't our mental health covered by I don't care what insurance, if you don't
have insurance, I don't give a shit either way.
Why isn't this stuff covered?
We're covering cancer.
We know cancer is killing people.
Well, so is our mental health stuff.
So that's one thing I would before I before I leave this earth, I would love to see a
mental health presumption bill here in Michigan that just covers it.
So no first responder, whether it be volunteer, part time, career, whatever it may be, has
no worries on whether, you know, I'm going to go to therapy this week or do I am I going
to buy groceries?
Yeah, because to me, that's atrocious.
Yeah, everything's getting expensive.
Yeah.
Well, like I've said to my military, you know, guests, we don't have a VA for the first responders.
So when I worked out after 14 years to just try and, you know, help the fire service,
you know, I don't get any benefits.
I don't have health insurance.
I have nothing, you know, and I'm a self employed.
So I don't know if anyone's self employed at that trying to get health insurance.
It's like you're not going to be able to afford it.
Yeah, you know, and that's fine.
That's not, you know, I'm I'm absolutely fine.
But it shows just, you know, if I was struggling and I needed to go see someone, it would be
hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
And even sadly, with the presumption laws, the number of horror stories I've heard, which
has been illustrated by this whole health care conversation has happened after that
murder, but people, you know, friends of mine have literally heard insurance companies say,
well, we're just going to fight it till they die anyway.
So even when there's a presumption law in place doesn't mean that that person is actually
going to get the help.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
And really, the insurance companies, if they took care of it, they would be they would
be dishing out less money.
Yeah.
You know, it's a cost saver.
But they would have to look at that over time over multiple careers of people.
They don't get to show their quarterly earnings to their boss to get their raise.
So we don't we don't get the big health change.
We get these quarterly increments that don't actually help anything.
Yeah.
And I think the other thing that makes us a little bit different is that when we work
with culturally competent clinicians throughout the state, we can't like the program can't
actually pay the clinicians to work with our first responders.
We're trying to figure out better ways to make this happen.
But we have agreements with them where they can help to reduce the costs.
So if they're like, hey, I don't take this person's insurance, but I can charge this
person fifteen fifteen dollars for a forty five session, a forty five minute session
versus the one hundred and fifty dollars or something like that.
We have a lot of we work with a lot of different clinicians and clinics that can give us kind
of those those spaces.
But it's not enough.
It's not nearly enough.
And so our goal is going to be to continue to train people who want to do this work and
who love it so much that they would do it for free if they could.
And so this is our goal is to is to make our state healthy and eventually our country.
Beautiful.
Well, I think what you're doing in Michigan is amazing.
It's been such an amazing conversation for people listening.
Where are the best places to find the podcast and Frontline Strong together?
How's the podcast?
FST5.org will get you to the website.
It's an amazing resource.
I had nothing to do with it.
Neither did Mike.
Manisha and her team took care of this website, did an amazing job.
And then also look up Mines on the Frontline on YouTube or any other podcast platform.
We do a full video podcast.
We put it on YouTube weekly.
We do clips every day.
We like to do one piece of content every single day where we do a clip from our podcast.
That's 30 to 60 seconds long.
So please check our stuff out.
It's great.
We're on Facebook.
It's Instagram, you can check us out anywhere there.
That's where we post our clips every day.
You can get full episodes on YouTube.
YouTube, Spotify, Apple Music, anywhere you get podcasts.
Check out the one with James Gearing in it.
He's pretty good.
That's a pretty good episode.
Thank you for having us.
This has been great.
Yeah, I want to thank you so much.
I mean, not only just hearing your stories and your kind of call to service and all the
different hats that you're wearing, but again, being thought leaders in the formation of
this, hopefully this will be a blueprint that other states will look at and start applying
as well because as we've touched on in so many different veins, our first responders
are phenomenal human beings.
Their families are phenomenal human beings.
So we owe it to them to turn it around.
And I think with this lens on our community at the moment with all the incredible things
they're doing out in North Carolina and now California, I think that the public eye is
there and this is the time for us to really kind of educate them on the deficits and then
what needs to change.
So I want to thank you all so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the
Behind the Shield podcast today.
Thanks for having us and thanks for what you've been doing for years.
Yeah, stay on the gas.
People are listening.
Stay on the gas.