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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,
documentary filmmaker, podcast host, and the man behind the PTSD 911 documentary,
and the man behind the PTSD 911 movie, Conrad Weaver.
Now in this conversation we discuss a host of topics, from his journey into making films,
the addiction crisis, mental health in first responders, the power of storytelling, podcasting, 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 over 1,000 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 Conrad Weaver. Enjoy.
Well Conrad, I want to start by saying thank you so, so much for taking the time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
Well, it's an honor and a privilege. Thank you for having me.
So where on planet Earth are we finding you this afternoon?
So I am in Firetown, USA, in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
It's the home of the National Fire Academy, the National Emergency Training Centers here.
It's just all things the, well actually the National Fallen Firefighter Memorial is here.
And so this is kind of, it's a very small town, but this is where I find myself for the past 20 some years.
So here in my studio in my basement.
How progressive are you finding that area?
Because what's interesting, our, the IFF used to be centered around Fairfax, Virginia.
But actually if you look at Fairfax Fire Department, they're still working a 56-hour week.
Here in Florida, we are the home of the Florida State Fire College.
Yet Marion County, where that is, still woefully behind and arguably refusing to move into the new generation if we're going to really solve this problem.
So is the area around Firetown, USA actually, you know, understanding and being open to the solutions that we're going to talk about today?
I think in word, yes, indeed, no.
Just my observation as an outsider, as someone who, you know, is in the community and interacting with the fire chief.
Actually, we met with the fire chief the other night.
Had some friends over and went up to the firehouse and hung out.
He's very onto it, but this is an all volunteer fire station.
And so he's full time down in Virginia.
And so he's very tuned into what wellness is, what's required, what's necessary.
But I think as a whole, the community is not.
However, I do have to say that Frederick County, so I live in Frederick County, Maryland.
Frederick County, the fire chief here has been very open to these things.
To hear and to listen.
He actually helped host a screening of the PTSD 9-in-1 documentary in the summer of 23.
And so I think there's some interest, perhaps a dabbling interest, but not a full vested, hey, we got to make this a priority.
You said the National Fallen Firefight Memorial. What about locally?
I mean, my feed is just riddled with deaths pretty much every single day.
And it's heartbreaking, whether it's our law enforcement from all the physical and mental issues or the line of duty deaths and the shootings, or whether it's the fire service.
I mean, we had a Hawaiian firefighter just killed, a Honolulu firefighter.
But then you've got numerous suicides.
We just had a Maryland firefighter killed yesterday or the day before.
Died in line of duty and on a fire, house fire.
So with that, obviously, operationally as part of it, but even with the line of duty deaths,
one thing that's not being discussed is just the exhaustion of our firefighters, the work weeks, the shift work,
and how much sleep deprivation factor in to maybe getting lost in primary search or not reading the smoke.
Not blaming as a sole thing, but that is a preventable element that I don't hear anyone talking about.
Sure. And a lot of this kind of came to mind when I was talking with our local fire chief.
And he's a lieutenant down in Virginia full time, has this full time job.
But then he said, you know, a lot of us come back here to Emmitsburg and we volunteer.
So we're in this all the time.
And in my mind, I'm thinking, is that healthy?
And I think he even acknowledged, yeah, it's probably not the best thing, but it's what we do.
You know, we're just in this thing.
And so, you know, as a volunteer, when he's off duty down in Virginia, you know, he's coming here
and he's jumping out of bed, running down across the street to the firehouse to jump on a rig and go
and take care of someone's emergency when he's off duty from his day job.
And a lot of these guys are, you know, a lot of the guys that work that volunteer here in Emmitsburg.
And I suppose maybe some places around the country, it's like that.
Other places, it's not quite so much that you have full time firefighters that are also volunteering.
But I think just that itself is a recipe for trouble down the road.
Yeah. I mean, if you put it a different way, the guy that works in the deli in your local grocery store
doesn't then go and volunteer in a deli in a different store on his days off.
You know what I mean? If you're all in, in your fire department, you have done enough there.
And I think that, you know, the volunteerism is really important.
But I think I feel like that's abused in a lot of areas.
I mean, the Northeast has a lot of highly populated suburban areas that are still relying on volunteers.
And I think that's completely unethical.
Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes there's filmmakers who volunteer on the side.
I've been guilty of that. And my wife reminds me, hey, you know, are you getting paid for that gig?
Well, no, not exactly.
So, you know, there is that level of altruism that I think many of us have to give back and to give.
But I think it can be taken too far where it becomes an obsession.
It could even become something that it's you hear the noises in your ears and you just want to put that aside.
And so you're just going to go work.
Yeah. And that's it. That's exactly it.
One of the least discussed unhealthy coping mechanisms that I've realized is busyness.
And so we have a term, the overtime whore.
I would argue that if you dive into the mind of a lot of those who are choosing not to be at home with their families, signing up for overtime,
there's probably a mental health condition going on.
There's something that needs to be addressed that they're trying to ignore by working.
Yeah, absolutely. So many people that I've talked to now since the film came out and the podcast have talked about that.
I've talked about just working the overtime.
Well, even in the film, Officer Desiree Palmer, she said, I just worked all the overtime I could, so I didn't have to think.
And that is really a symptom of a deeper issue going on in someone's life.
Absolutely. Well, we're going to do the timeline and get to the film.
But while we're talking about Desiree, when I was watching it, she was someone I was really worried about, just as an observer.
You see how bright eyed and youthful she looked when she was young.
And even some of the clips, I don't know how you filmed it with her being in uniform.
But towards the end, she just looked even physically broken down, like her skin, everything.
How is she doing now?
She is making progress. That's a good thing.
She has really worked hard at it.
And well, she's now helping others. She's now reaching out and getting others into help.
And while at the same time, working on her own mental health, working on her own physical challenges that she has,
part of her big story was that we didn't really dive into was just the injury, the physical injuries that she had.
And so she's had 11 surgeries on her wrist.
And so that really was a big issue with her because she wasn't able to use her weapon because of that injury.
But she's finally found a surgeon that knew what he was doing because the first eight or nine didn't know what they were doing.
And it was terrible. And so she is making progress.
She comes to some of the screenings that we host and she speaks on stages.
And so that's been an amazing transformation for her, really step outside of her comfort zone.
She doesn't like to be on camera. She doesn't like to be on the stage, but she's learning to,
in a live audience, tell her story and follow up with people.
And I see her light up when we go to an event and people come up afterwards and they give her a hug and they ask her how she's doing.
And it just gives her energy. And so that always makes me feel good when we see that.
Was the injury on the job or was it outside?
On the job. On the job.
So this, you know, we talked about this before we hit record. What's interesting is once you make a film and obviously a film is years in the making,
it made me realize, and this is a good thing, how quickly the thought leaders have evolved in this conversation.
But she touched on the organizational betrayal. So she's her on the job in her uniform.
She's all in. I mean, I remember her saying there was a time when she was the only cop in the whole county.
And that's just terrifying in itself. It shows a broken system if you got one cop.
But, you know, that it was kind of like back the blue. But when she got hurt, when she had this mental health crisis, now she's on the outside.
And this is a reoccurring theme over and over again. Another elephant in the room in this conversation is, you know,
if they were a good recruit, you know, when you hired them and they met all the benchmarks and they proved themselves in probation or whatever it was,
and then you turn your back on them, it's one thing being separated from the tribe,
but having the tribe literally turn their back on to ostracize you, that is so, so detrimental to our first responders and military and other uniform professions.
Yeah. And I don't understand how that, how people can do that.
You know, when you invested sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in someone to get them to be the best that they can be to take care of your community,
and then you turn your back on them. I don't understand that. I mean, I'm an empath and I care deeply for people.
And so I don't understand how someone can just kick someone to the curb. Yeah, maybe they messed up. Okay. We all messed up. Right.
And maybe they were, you know, a challenge to leadership.
But sometimes, sometimes leadership needs to be challenged. Right. And so when those things happen to an individual and their kick to the curb,
I couldn't imagine if someone in my world, my family, if they would say, oh, you messed up once, you're out. Go. You know, that'd be devastating.
And so when you invested so much time and energy into a job to be the best and tell you in, and I have to say in Desiree's case,
so that the footage where she's in uniform that you see her working in uniform was actually from a previous documentary that I produced where she was a part of that.
So it was called Heroin's Grip, a story about the opioid crisis.
And what I did, and we got permission to film with her because she was a family member. Her sister was an, is still an active heroin user.
And so she had empathy for people in addiction. And so we followed her and I spent hours with her in her patrol car going through the neighborhoods.
And I'm telling you, when we pulled up to one of the roughest parts of town, the kids came running to greet her.
It was amazing to see. She was that community police officer who cared deeply for her community.
And I think sometimes even her empathy for those people caught in addiction was a problem with her fellow officers.
Yeah. You know, and so she had a lot of strikes against her with her with her teammates.
This is what I've seen as an evolution as well. There's an awakening happen. I just finished my second book and that is absolutely woven in the origin story of all the things that we've judged in the past.
Homelessness, addiction, sex work, gang membership, you know, the first responder that spirals down, whatever it is.
But that's the kindness and compassion that sent us into uniform in the first place.
And this is what really breaks my heart slash angers me is when you hear people talking about, oh, it's a waste of Narcan with these addicts or let's just move these homeless to a different jurisdiction.
And it's that same toxicity that then is applied to our own first responders when they're struggling. So we can't just change one thing. We've got to change all the things.
Right. And if you know, you listen to nearly every single place officer right. And if you especially recently, their stance on prohibition of drugs, for example, is it's a complete failure.
And we've got to change it and arresting addicts is not working. You know, just even arresting the dealers, another one just pops up. So, you know, if you want to cut the head off the snake, heal the people that are relying on drugs.
Right. It was interesting. The one day I was riding with her, we pulled into one of the community parks and we in the shelter, there was this body lay in there and ended up being a young man and his arms are all shot to hell.
You know, you know, from heroin use or whatever else he was injecting into his system.
And so she kind of woke him up and, and we ended up getting his permission to film him. And she was like, Hey, are you okay? Are you, you know, do you need help? And we ended up going to McDonald's and getting him some breakfast and brought it back to him, to him.
And three times that day we came back and checked on him.
And she told me later, she said, you know, he probably had dope on him.
Well, actually, let me back up. The first time we met him, she made a phone call. She picked up her phone, her personal cell phone, called a friend, arranged for this guy to go to in-house treatment the next day.
And then we then we followed up with him several times that day. She said, yeah, he probably had dope on him. But, you know, you're giving him a set of handcuffs isn't going to help his situation.
And I have to say that the next day he went to treatment.
And as far as I know, he has been sober ever since.
And doing amazing things. In fact, she keeps in touch with him and his girlfriend.
And it was just an amazing journey, just, you know, one officer really caring and doing the thing that many officers don't do is actually, you know, caring for the individual and seeing past their, their mess, seeing past their crime, so to speak, and seeing the human being.
And that's what I really appreciated about her. And that's what makes it such a hard thing to see her kick to the curb by her fellow officers and the leadership in her department.
Well, and this is what we need. I mean, if you look at Portugal, for example, they decriminalized addiction. And what they realize is while while we stigmatize addiction drug use, the people using are going to stay in the shadows. They're going to lean into the underworld because that's what they have to do. Because they don't want to be arrested because how the hell are they going to climb out the hole with a string of criminal records?
So what Portugal did is like, well, we're going to take that money that we used to use on that America model, just, you know, the war on drugs. This is your brain. And we're going to apply it instead. And this is what was different about anything that's been tried in the US. They poured that money and created addiction counseling, mental health counseling, job creation, housing.
So they envelop these addicts if they wanted to. They they volunteered. You take away all that stigma, all of a sudden people want help. And not everyone as well. This is the big important thing. You can't get everyone. So what we like to do in America is point to the few that it didn't work for and go see doesn't work and ignore all the ones that it did.
So this is, you know, I think it just it makes perfect sense. And if you really want, you know, the evidence, then look at it the other way. If you create prohibition of drugs, and we're not talking about dealers and smugglers, they still go to jail in Portugal.
But if you do that model, then you create what you see in America now, streets, riddle with gangs, you know, the, the prostitution, the homelessness, and even arguably the the violence in our schools, because other countries don't have that. Portugal doesn't have that Switzerland doesn't have that.
So, you know, we've done a great job of figuring out how not to do it. Now it's time for us to have the humility to figure out how to do it. Yeah, I think it comes down to really caring for the human being. You're caring for individuals who are, you know, well, I remember one time after showing that film heroin's grip, we had a paramedic came to one of our screenings.
And he said, you know what, I don't think I'll ever look at an addict, the same again, without thinking, okay, who's who are his parents, who are the people who love this person said before I would just get angry.
Just, it's them again. You know, this kid, we just Narcan him yesterday. And now we're back. He said, now because of your film, I'm going to look at that a little bit differently. And I'm hoping he does. I'm hoping he actually followed through with that.
But I think that's what it takes. It takes us to realize that people are people, people are human beings, they have loved ones, every person that's, you know, laying in a gutter someplace at one point had a family who cared for him.
Yeah, I love that phrase. Don't ask what what's wrong with you asked what happened to you.
Because just like you said, no kid in you know, kindergarten age is just kind of lurking in the corner going on, I'm going to be pimping hose in a few years.
He's thinking about the ball or his crayons, you know, and then life happens. So yeah, the fact that we act like a drug, you know, a homeless guy just needs to get a job or an addict just needs to wake up one day, eat salad and run five miles, and that's going to fix everything shows you just the kind of blinkered mentality that we've got, you know, through this, you know, divisive politicians and media, and it's not, you know, it's a nuanced conversation. And, you know, what really gets me as well, how many people go to holy buildings and study texts that say, oh, I'm going to be a
compassionate. Would Jesus be a judgy asshole? Probably not.
He hung out with us. He hung out with the derelicts of the earth.
You know, there was a thought that floated through my brain and it just kept on going so I'll have to try to retrieve it at some point to, but it was a good point.
Well, I want to go to the beginning of your timeline and please when that comes back in, then just jump in. So tell me where you were born and tell me a little bit about your family dynamic, what your parents did, how many siblings?
Yeah. So I was born in Ohio and I was actually born into a very conservative Mennonite family.
My father ended up being a pastor of a Mennonite church. I'm the oldest of five children. My dad, he was a jack of all trades. Sometimes he was a truck driver. Sometimes he was a machinist.
My mom was a home, you know, home, he worked at home and took care of us kids.
And so we had tough upbringing just because of poverty. We were very poor growing up and I remember there was times when we had to rely on the church people to bring us meals.
And it was tough. But I say all those things really helped shape me who I am today. And I don't look back at that in anger or frustration. I just look back as that happened to me and that was a part of my life and that's all I knew.
But I was the first one in my family to have aspirations to go to college. And so when I was a young, young adult, I had dreams of becoming a surgeon and becoming a doctor.
But I had a really bad math and science background in high school. And when I got off to college, I was making C's and D's in chemistry and biology.
And so from there, I switched to psychology after my advisor advised me not to pursue a medical degree because he said, you're not going to get into medical school.
And so I went to psychology thinking perhaps I'd go on to a higher education in psychology as far as getting a master's or a doctorate.
And one thing led to another. And I ended up working at a psychiatric hospital in South Carolina. And it was an adolescent program.
It was really meaningful work. At the time, the patients that we had would stay a couple of months and you could actually see progress.
And it was really meaningful. I worked there three and a half years. And as time progressed there, though, I could see that the length of time and stays were shorter and shorter just because of insurance cuts.
And by the time I left three and a half years later, the average stay was five days. And there's nothing you can do for treatment in five days, other than keep them safe for a few days.
And unfortunately, oftentimes, many of those young people would be shipped off to the state hospital, which from all accounts was just a horrible place.
And so that kind of gave me that kind of insight into the human psyche, just seeing the backgrounds of these kids come from. All of them came from trauma.
Every single one of them came from trauma. And ironically, at the time, I was attending this church. I'm a person of faith. I'm open about that.
I was attending this church and our, our pastor called me and he said, Hey, you know, our youth pastor left and we're looking for someone to take his place.
And my wife and I had known that he had left and we're the whole man that I pay the guy who takes his place because he was kind of a rock star type youth minister.
Well, I became that guy became the replacement. And so I spent six and a half years in youth ministry.
And then I got a job in Colorado in publishing and helped launch a big youth ministry website for a publishing company moved to Colorado for a couple of years and then through changes.
Well, in the meantime, you know, I got married and we had children had two children and my wife is an educator. She's she taught taught middle school and elementary school for 25 years.
And we moved around Colorado and moved to Maryland where I got a new job at another church doing production work. And that's what introduced me to video.
I had never, I had shot some video on a little handy cam, you know, recorder, you know, but I never like produced the actual video until I came to this church and the pastor was like, Hey, can you make this video?
I said, sure. I had no idea what I was doing. And we did. And turns out I was pretty good at it. And in the meantime, people started seeing my work on the screen.
And so I started getting hired to do side jobs. And pretty soon I was doing work for a, an executive producer that was formerly with good morning America.
And I was on Capitol Hill doing interviews with congressmen members of Congress and senators and all kinds of cool stuff doing stakeouts outside buildings, getting people to, you know, talking to the camera and microphone stuff.
So that was all fun stuff. And then in 2012, I was reading a blog about these people who harvest wheat.
They take their families and they take their equipment and they go to Texas and they start in Texas and they work their way North through the plant across the plains of America, harvesting wheat for farmers.
And I was like, that's pretty interesting. And my wife looked over my shoulder and she said, you should make a movie about that.
And I said, that's a great idea. And so I spent the next three years working on a film that's called the great American wheat harvest. It ended up doing really well.
We won a regional Emmy award for that film and it's still on Amazon. It's my, my, still my best seller on Amazon.
You know, it's an agriculture film. I kind of grew up on the, on my, my grandfather's dairy farm. So when I, in the summer months, I'd be working on the farm. So I was accustomed to being around all the farm equipment and animals and all the stuff that farmers do.
The farmers in this film, when I first approached them, they were like, who are you? You from Hollywood? Have you ever been on a farm?
I said, look, I grew up in a dairy farm. I've had shit on my boots. And they're like, oh, you get us. And so they welcomed me in. And then that film led to the next film, which is called thirsty land.
It's a story about the drought in the American West.
And both of those stories took me away from home for weeks at a time. And so I started to look for something closer home and the opioid crisis came roaring into this community.
And so we, I produced heroines grip. It's a story. It's a local story here in Maryland. And that's where I met Desiree and the chief of police at the time.
I had met with him and he said, I have an officer for you. She, she has a sister in addiction and she'd be great for you to get to know. And so I spent time with her, spent time with the local sheriff's department doing ride alongs with the drug interdiction team, spent time with our local fire and EMS, riding with the medics and going to different scenes that they go to.
And we produced that film and that's, and it was the one day I was with Desiree when we were called to a fatal overdose and lights and sirens off to the scene.
We walk in and you know, if you're a first responder, you've seen this it's chaos in the house. Mom's screaming over here because her daughter is laying dead in the bathroom.
We go in and I'm just like, what am I seeing here? Not accustomed to all this, you know, and there's a body laying there.
But the first responders on scene were like, it's just Tuesday.
It's just another day.
And when we left, we were riding away from the scene. I looked over at Desiree and said, man, you guys are like joking around back there. You were laughing, you know, and the body's laying right there.
You couldn't avoid that. I mean, it's like, yeah, it's definitely coping mechanisms.
And I said, well, is PTSD like a thing with you guys? I had no clue.
And she goes, oh man, if you only knew the half of it. And then she looked at me and she said, if you want to make a documentary about that, I'll do anything I can to help you.
And what we didn't realize is that she'd become one of the main characters in the film that's now PTSD 911.
And that's the origin of that film and how we got to that spot.
So I hope that answered your question. Yeah, no, it does.
But I'm going to take you all the way back. Yeah. Yeah. You said you grew up in Ohio. Where exactly in Ohio?
So I grew up about 80 miles south of Cleveland in a little town called Beach City and also the town of Sugar Creek, Ohio, which is right in the center of the Amish community in Ohio.
My parents weren't Amish. They were Amish when they were little as kids, but they were in the Mennonite community and that's where I grew up.
My wife's from North Canton, so I'm in Ohio quite a bit. Very familiar.
I've been through there many times, but I've never been to the Hall of Fame there in Canton. So yeah, the football Hall of Fame.
So when I think of Ohio, I think, just like you said, especially with the recent opioid crisis, that is the hub.
And I had Sam Crononis on a couple of times who wrote Dreamland about that very thing.
Talk to me about the devastation that you've witnessed. You talked about where you are now, but also even then in Ohio itself.
You know, the devastation that I...
Let me back up. So Northeast Ohio, East Canton, Akron, all those areas, you know, devastated with drugs.
Even the local high school when I was growing up, I was in Stark County. We had Fairless High School. It was the high school that I was supposed to go to.
My parents ended up putting us into a private school. I'm not sure how they afforded it, but they did.
Because they said the high school that's here, it's the number two high school in the state for drugs.
And they didn't want us to have anything to do with that. And so that was the rural community that we grew up in.
I know that the worst area for, during the height of the opioid crisis, Dayton, Ohio was really...
Actually, Montgomery County, Ohio was the number one county in the country for overdose deaths.
And I've had several screenings of my film Heroin Script in that community.
And just talking to those people, just the devastation there was unbelievable.
And it's interesting, I just recently read Malcolm Gladwell's latest book. I don't know if you're a fan of Malcolm Gladwell.
I listened to him on podcasts. I actually haven't read his books yet, but I need to start.
Yeah, his books are fascinating. His most recent one is The Revenge of the Tipping Point.
And he goes into the origins of the opioid crisis in that book.
It's a fascinating look at what actually happened when these drug companies decided to market their products.
They were very specific at what states they marketed to, because there were certain states that had triplicate laws,
where a doctor prescribing an opioid would have to write the prescription on triplicate.
So there was multiple copies. One would go to the state, one would go to, I guess, the local government.
And so there was a record of those doctors giving or prescribing those drugs.
Well, they didn't target any of those states. So the states that did not have triplicate laws were Idaho and Nevada.
I think West Virginia was one of them. All the states where opioids were the worst, those were the states that they targeted specifically.
And then they would send their sales reps to doctors. They found that if they went twice a month, they sold way more OxyContin.
If they dropped down to once a month visit to the doctor, the salespeople going to the doctor, and they would not only visit them, but they would wine and dine them, getting them to write more prescriptions.
And when they went at least twice a month, their sales just skyrocketed.
And so they kept sending these good looking salespeople to visit these doctors, taking them out for dinner and expensive meals and wine and all this other stuff.
So they would buy more and sell more OxyContin. And that's really what fueled this whole thing with overdoses.
It's just a fascinating look. So I highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell.
There's a lot of nitty gritty in that book that some people will gloss over, but that chapter specifically is really, really fascinating.
Did you ever watch the series Dope Sick? Michael Keaton was in it.
I have seen some of it. I know one of the people that was in that film, in that series.
What's his name? He used to be in Chicago.
Is Jason? No. I forget. He lives in LA now, but yeah, he's a friend of mine.
OK, yeah, the Netflix made one with Matthew Broderick that was OK, but Dope Sick was such a powerful look because they took all the layers. They took the closing of jobs and the poverty that was existing and then the predatory nature and then the lies.
And then the FDA people who now work for Purdue, and they just told the story so well.
And then the doctor who was an altruistic, old fashioned GP that was just trying to help his community and then believed these people and then got addicted himself.
And then there's a recovery story at the end. But if anyone has not seen Dope Sick, you need to watch Dope Sick. It is one of the best pieces of television I've watched in a long time.
Yeah, I've not seen the whole series, but I have seen pieces of it. Yeah, incredible.
Well, then going to another interesting thing, the adolescent psych element. You touched on, you know, they all had trauma. Let's expand a little bit more. You've got this giggling kindergarten that all they care about is a ball and a crayon.
What are the things that were happening to these children that ended up creating these mental health issues that they were institutionalized for?
So one of the stories that sticks out to me primarily was this young boy. He was 12 years old.
He had come to us that we were in South Carolina. He had come to us from California.
Where his, now get this, he was probably 10 when this happened initially. His mother had divorced his dad, and then she started seeing this other guy who would come to their little league games.
This guy was a predator.
He married this boy's mom just to have access to the boy.
And then, and then kidnapped him, takes him to California, where he dresses him as a girl, and he lives in a commune.
And so there was a nationwide manhunt for this boy, and this man, they found him, arrested the dad, we got the boy.
It was so sad. He was with us for probably, I think around two months.
And he spent a lot of time in, this is a psychiatric hospital, locked ward.
We had what we call the quiet room, where we could, it wasn't a padded room, it was very hard walls. But we would, if they were out of control, we'd put him, and he basically lived in the quiet room for his entire time there.
He was such an angry little boy.
I'll never forget the day he left. We all did kind of a closure with him and spent time, and he looked at me and he said, thank you. Thank you for putting me in the quiet room.
He said, I needed that.
He probably felt safe there. That's what's so tragic.
Right, right. Yeah.
It was just, I often wonder what happened to him.
It's just sad. We had other children, heavily involved in drugs. We had one young boy, I think he was 16, had come in, he was high on acid when he came in.
His dad was a high powered attorney who always bailed him out. Every time he did something stupid, dad would bail him out.
He went off to a drug treatment center, and a month later came back and we did not recognize him.
He came back just to say thank you.
That was one of the good ones that come back. 99% of them don't come back to say thank you, but he did. That really meant something.
You're staying with these children, you're working with them, and you're seeing their trauma, and you're trying to help them get to a better spot.
That was my job. I was at the bottom of the totem pole. I was a mental health technician. I was part of the nursing staff.
I would write notes as to my interactions with these children, and that the psychiatrist would take my notes and help make decisions based on that.
That was really meaningful to be able to do that.
We came home black and blue. We had one 16-year-old girl. She came out of family therapy one day, was just pissed, and just wanted to come in and make a phone call.
We said, well, it's probably not a good time to make a phone call right now. She thought it was, and it took 12 of us to take her to the ground.
Then she bit a nurse on her breast, drew blood. We ended up giving her five milligrams of Navain and taking her back to the quiet room.
I came home that night black and blue. It was rough.
I had an issue when my son was in middle school. He had been going through some challenges himself emotionally.
His mother and I were divorced. She was with another person. They were very turbulent in their relationship.
There were numerous times he'd call me and say, Daddy, can you come get me? They wouldn't even realize that he was gone.
He'd be knocking on the door saying, I'm leaving. He'd just come on and go.
Again, not blaming an individual thing, but that was the environment that he was in at the time.
He was getting counseling at school. I'm driving home from the station. Usually he calls me and lets me know he's on the bus.
I didn't get a call. I'm like, okay, well, let me call him. I call him.
The principal of the school at the time answers and said, oh, yeah, he's had an emotional breakdown.
We'll let you know what we're going to do. I hung up and I'm like, what the fuck is this?
Anyway, I waited and waited, never got a phone call, called again, and then basically was told that he was now on a 72-hour hold at the local psych facility.
I go there, furious and trying to work out what's happened. All he did was cry at his desk.
He was having intrusive thoughts, but as I know now through the people that evaluated him, age-appropriate intrusive thoughts, a kid had been mean to him.
He was just thinking, not acting, just thinking. They disregarded all protocol.
The protocol is to reach out to the mental health facility. They send someone to evaluate. The entire thing is for down regulation.
The SRO, who was an absolute turd as well, obviously she just wanted to go home.
What was really bad is when he was in there, those three days, numerous other kids from this one middle school came in and out.
It was like a revolving door. The damage that that alone did to my son, to this day, is inexcusable.
When I dove into it, apparently there was a statewide problem. It wasn't me by any means.
There were lots of wheels in motion already, but the law got changed. If they did that today, that principal and that cop would be behind fucking bars right now.
The reason I give you this whole monologue before is there are elements of the way our children are treated that, as you just detailed, can be very beneficial.
There are a lot of them that are very detrimental as well. With this lens that you have now reflecting on that time, what were the things that worked well that you think should still be around?
Were there any giant red flags that shouldn't be an avenue that our children are sent down?
There was times when I saw the real benefit of psychiatric care, in-house psychiatric care, really mostly when these kids were a harm to themselves.
They were a threat to themselves or to someone else. I think that's when that kind of treatment care is probably necessary to protect them.
We had kids that were threatening suicide all the time. We had kids threaten us. I was threatened one time by this young boy. He was just angry.
We had to make sure that I wasn't anywhere near him, where he could jump out at me or something.
What I saw work is when there was a combination of genuine psychiatric care that didn't just involve pushing pills. That's often what has happened in the past.
Taking to the hospital, you need antidepressants, you need this. But when there's actual family therapy, when the parents get involved, because that was the biggest issue with these kids, was their families.
They came from families that were broken, not only broken as far as divorce, but broken just as broken human beings. That's often what precipitated them to come into the hospital.
There was times when I was like, why is this kid here? Because a little bit of outpatient therapy would be fine and to be okay.
But then looking at it from my wife as a school administrator, she's a principal at a middle school. She has been an assistant principal for eight years and this year has become a principal.
She deals with this kind of stuff all the time where they have to evaluate. They had some kids that ended up in the hospital this year because they were a threat to themselves or a threat to others.
It's a tricky place for an administrator to be. They almost have to have a degree in psychology to understand what's going on with some of these kids.
That's why they have a counselor there, they have nurses there in the school that can help evaluate. It's a tricky situation to keep that person safe, but then also to keep your school safe and a safe environment so that kids can learn.
Yeah, I think the biggest thing for me is looking at those types of situations and are they a threat to themselves? Are they a serious threat?
That's when even working with the PTSD 911 film, I've learned that you have to ask the direct question. Are you thinking of hurting, are you thinking of harming yourself? Do you have a plan?
If they're thinking about it, you're not going to put the idea in their head. I think even for a young person of a school age, that's a question that needs to be asked. If they are, then perhaps there's something that needs to be done to get them into the help that they need.
Well, I think the other thing, and I've heard this from a lot of people now, is that a teacher isn't a counselor, a firefighter isn't a counselor. This is what they did wrong, is there was a counselor that was supposed to come to the school and do that because they are not trained.
You're a principal, stay in your lane. You're an SRO, stay in your lane. But they disregarded that. What was nauseating is when I, because I pulled records of how many kids had been Baker Act, I went fucking all in.
And to the point where I sat down with the police and the school, the school blamed the police, the police blamed the school. And I was like, okay, so this is basically the same cowardice that I'm calling out now. Yet again, all these people that are in these positions that are supposed to be courageous are not at all.
So like I said, it's changed now. But what the danger was, is there was no punitive action for them disregarding the protocols they were supposed to have followed and imprisoning children, kidnapping children. So, you know, this is, this is a conversation is that the teacher shouldn't have to be doing mental health evaluations.
Sure. And yes, and also, how many kids when they're emotional, not that this has even happened with my son, how many kids say I'm going to go kill myself, you know, we all know that that's something that a kid throws out that doesn't mean it's a genuine threat. So you're going to Baker Act every child that says that or you're going to put your big boy pants on, take a moment, get them evaluated, get someone who's trained to talk to them.
And then yeah, if they really truly seem like they are then absolutely then the facility might be the place. But to take a kid that was just having a bad day and lock them in a place and take their shoelaces for three days. You categorically hands down are going to make that child even worse. And do you think they're ever going to trust you to tell them when they're actually hurting? No, you're just destroyed all trust now.
That's just bad leadership. You know, this is bad untrained leadership who doesn't understand that and perhaps even selfish leadership. They're just thinking about themselves and their school and just so yeah, that's unfortunate. I'm sorry that happened to you guys.
Yeah, well, I mean, like I said, what I always tell my son is because of that, we, you know, blew open at least locally here what was going on and it added to that already big movement of making change. So I'd still love to see those two behind bars to be honest and pay for what they did.
But sure, the best thing we can do is talk about on a podcast instead and shame them.
Yeah. All right, you know who you are fuckers. Anyway, moving on. So we talked about, you know, the journey into the opioid crisis and you may in Desiree explain to me then the decision to do the film on PTSD and then what was your perspective of opening Pandora's Box at that point when it came to our professions?
So, you know, whenever I'm have a film idea, I always do some research to find out who else has told this story.
Because I don't want to just repeat what someone else has done.
So in 2019 2018 2019 when I started thinking about this and when when actually Desiree gave me the idea, you know, if you want to make a film about this, I'll do anything I can to help you.
I was researching and I couldn't find much out there about this. As far as documentary films I saw a few news clips here and there from some news channels even some national broadcast channels, but I didn't see anything in the space in the documentary space that tells the
story of post traumatic stress within the first responder community saw lots of films about veterans.
So it was an issue, no doubt.
But I saw very little in the first responder space and so whenever I see an opportunity to tell a story that hasn't been told and I then I start saying okay this is something that needs to be told.
And my thoughts were there are first responders in every single community in America, every single community in the world for the most part, at least in the first world.
This is an issue that's likely affecting most of them.
You know every community has an ambulance has been on the accident scene on a highway and they're, they're cutting, you know bodies out of a smashed up vehicle that's traumatizing.
And he'd be traumatizing to me I think he'd be traumatizing anybody even the hardest person would be be a challenge. I remember. So living here in Emmitsburg is surrounded by fire community and firefighters and so the local firehouse they were
celebrating 125 years as a volunteer fire department and they reached out to me about making a little short historical documentary about their department so I did.
And in the process of that one of the one of the older gentleman told me a story about an accident that happened here on the, on the highway before it was a four lane highway it was a two lane highway, where a whole car load of people in it like an old
station wagon. I think there was nine people in the station wagon, all of them were killed in a head on collision.
And, or might have been a van I don't remember but they were all killed every every person on on the scene was dead. And they pulled in. I know what their, their, their ambulance was the old. This is way back the old station wagon looking
hearse looking car. Yeah, yeah. That was their, that was their wagon they pulled up in.
And they were back on the radio saying, you're going to need a whole lot more of these things because there's nobody alive here.
And this still haunted this old, old retired firefighter, you know, EMT.
I can see it in his eyes.
And that, and that was a few years before I started to work on this film but that always stuck in my head.
It's like even here in this little rural community of Maryland.
Terrible terrible things have happened that have affected these firefighters.
Then I went to visit one of my buddies here he's an old retired firefighter, old volunteer here in the community.
He was a photographer for years so we became good friends.
And I'll just sit and chew in the fat with him one day.
I kind of asked him about this hey do you guys like, do you have things that bother you from the past.
And here in Emmitsburg, you know, it's a volunteer station I think they have a couple of paid EMTs that run the ambulance but all the fire apparatus is all run by volunteers. So whenever there's an emergency call they blow the whistle, the big siren that goes off.
And then, of course, obviously, people have scanners and if you're retired first responder more than likely you have a scanner in your house like he does, you can hear it anywhere in his house.
You'd hear the scanner he said when those tones go off, he said, if there's a call for a working fire with entrapment.
He says, I can still smell that smell.
I was on the nozzle I had to go in and I had to find a mom and her baby.
So I can still smell that.
That was 50 years ago.
And I said well what kind of training did you have back then for taking, taking care of these things.
It was suck it up here's a beer.
That was the training we got.
And so that was the motivation I needed to.
Okay, let's tell the story.
And let's not only tell the story but in my films I like to offer some kind of solutions or showcase organizations and people that are doing things better than others.
So that's kind of what really, I like to do that and so you know this film has. That's the path I took to tell the story to bring these stories to light, and to then say hey this, this can be better.
I was at Anaheim for a few years and Mattie Fiorenza was high I think he was like three years ahead of me something like that couple years.
Talk to me about how you met Mattie because obviously he's one of the main people in the film that you follow.
Sure. So in when I started working on this film. I had reached out to a friend of mine another filmmaker here in Maryland in the area and we had been friends for a number of years and her name is Nancy, and she had always expressed interest in working
and becoming a partner or becoming a producer on a film.
And so I brought her in on this film. And as we were developing this and talking about stories and who we could have in the film, we decided to set up a web page with a form that people can submit their stories.
And one of those stories that I don't know if Maddie submitted it or someone, I think someone introduced us to Maddie. And so whenever those stories came in, I would hand them off to Nancy to vet those stories so she would jump on a zoom call and just spend
some time understanding their story hearing it out.
And so she had this call with Maddie.
And
as soon as she got off that call she called me. She was like, I found our firefighter.
He's got a fascinating story.
He's well spoken, he looks good he's going to be great on camera. And that's, you know, those kind of things you know filmmaker speak in the backside you have to think about those things.
And, but his but more importantly his he's willing to tell his story.
And to dive into it. And so, and then I was, we arranged a zoom call for me to talk to him and this was during coven. So, in 2020.
And then I had once I was like yes this is the guy and he's willing to, to talk.
Then that February I think of 21. I ended up going out to California for the first time, and spent a week with him.
And then I was back, three or four times in the course of three years.
So what did you see over those three years, as far as his highs and lows.
That's.
Yeah, there was definitely high highs and low lows in those three years.
We're actually two years who's fall of 22 and we were finished.
Yeah, when I went out. The first time, you know he was in a good spot.
He was helping others. He was still working.
And, but he was you know making a difference for others he had been, you know, sharing his story with you know locally within the local community he was work had helped start a treatment facility was doing really amazing things.
And then a few months later, later that summer I came back to visit, and we were, he was back to work now. And we had arranged with Anaheim that I would be able to come and do ride alongs.
And so he was reassigned to a different station from what his normal station, think was station three, right outside of Disney there. And he was reassigned to I think of station 10 up in the hills kind of bougie area of the city.
And, you know that we had one call that shift, you know, and it was an accident and it's the scene that you see in the film is the accident on the highway there.
And.
But it was soon after that he was like, I don't think I can do this.
And to start talking about you know, getting his retirement and. And so it was then a few months later.
I get a phone call from him.
He said,
you don't want me in your film anymore.
It's like, what, what's going on. He said, well, I picked up again.
And his drug of choice was alcohol.
And he said, I'm just not doing good I picked up again.
I said, Maddie, that's exactly why I want you in the film.
Because I'm not going to make this film and make it all pretty and it's going to tie it up in a nice bow and it's all fixed, right.
Because as long as you're a human being, as long as your heart's beating, there's chance for amazing success and there's chance for devastating failures.
And that's the story.
And I'll do whatever I can to, you know,
just to be an observer and to follow your story where I didn't know where these stories were going to go.
I didn't know if all my main characters were going to end up alive.
I had no idea, but I was willing to take that risk to follow them to wherever it may lead as hard as that may have been.
And it wasn't until.
And you can see this in the film.
The one day I came back to visit and three weeks before he had a suicide attempt.
And I was like, yeah, that was hard.
It was hard for me as a friend now to see.
And, and sometimes it's hard for me just full disclosure here.
Sometimes it's hard when I'm making a film to be purely objective because I've become friends with my subjects.
And I have to, in some ways say, okay, I've got to be able to tell the story objectively without getting enmeshed into the story itself.
And sometimes that's difficult.
Well, I think, like you said, it's really important for people to see it's an undulation and hopefully the trending is still in the right direction.
Absolutely.
I mean, I'm preaching to the choir, most addiction stories weren't, oh, I went to addiction counseling once and then I was sober the rest of my life.
It's these multiple attempts.
And I've had people on the show that they were on their third time around.
They're like, if this doesn't work, I'm done.
I'm going to just end it.
And thank God it did.
And now they're running a sobriety organization of themselves.
But, you know, it's so important for people to understand.
It might, you know, first time just be off to the races, but then your child gets cancer or, you know, your dog dies or whatever it is.
Something happens where it derails you again.
And now you're leaning into that unhealthy coping mechanism.
But I think this is why we were talking before we hit record.
We now in this 2025 lens is this is evolving so quickly, which is beautiful to see.
I think it's because there were a lot of great people putting information out there, but most of us were blind to it.
Now that hope of post-traumatic growth, that hope of healing, but understanding that, you know, you might be black and blue from falling off the frickin' cart so many times, but that's OK.
As long as people on the cart reach out and they pull you back up, there doesn't need to be any guilt and shame that you fell off.
So eventually it will stick. It will stick for almost all of us.
But, you know, if we have this kind of, you know, look down on those shame about, well, they, you know, do you hear about so and so they went to the center of her excellence and now they're drinking again.
All right. Well, then what next? Is it psychedelics? Is it, you know, save a warrior? Is it where else can we try?
Because obviously that didn't. There's a reason why that didn't connect.
Are they drowning in financial debt? Can we do something there? Are their hormones low? Is that why they're struggling?
There's so many other elements that, you know, we can address.
So it's important that it isn't a Chicago fire episode where, oh, I'm struggling. Oh, hey, here's, you know, here's one session of counseling. All right. Now I'm going to go start a nonprofit.
Right. Yeah. And that's the thing that I've learned, you know, working on these two films kind of back to back is that the struggle.
It's a, it's a lifelong struggle.
You know, if you're caught in addiction, if you're it's you're going to deal with that probably the rest of your life.
There's going to be days when it's going to be a lot easier than others.
You know, and I had one guy tell me one time he said, you know what?
I'm never going to knock someone down and or laugh at them or or chide them for going back to rehab because this may be the one time that it clicks.
You know, you fall off, you get back into it. Now you're picking yourself back up.
You go and I saw that happening in my previous film had a young guy that had been using heroin for 10 years.
He had been just in and out. In fact, during the very first time we interviewed him, he was high.
He had just at the time he was snorting heroin and he tells me this later.
And in the process of the two years we worked on that film, he was in and out of treatment centers two or three times.
And finally, as far as I know, for the past four or five years now, he has been sober has has kids.
I think he just had his third daughter now and is doing amazing things.
So it's if there's if your heart's beating, there is still hope.
There is hope for recovery. There's hope for wellness. There's hope for the future if your heart is beating.
And, you know, I have to have to tell this story.
So when I was working on that previous films, I was invited to go attend an AA meeting down in down in Washington, D.C.
I had never been never been to AA or NA or any of those kinds of meetings.
And this was a group that has been meeting continuously for 30 years.
And I walked into this place, a total stranger. I was amazed.
There was black and white and straight and gay and just every kind of socioeconomic level you could think of.
I mean, it's Washington, D.C. So you some very wealthy people, some very poor people, you have street people.
It was the whole whole gamut of the population I saw and felt so much love in that room.
Where they loved on each other, they challenged each other.
But they loved on each other. They celebrated the wins.
They encouraged those that were struggling. And the love that I experienced there, I had never felt.
And I have to say this as a person of faith growing up in the church, I have never seen that or felt that in church.
At this mostly secular AA meeting, it was amazing.
And so anyone that is struggling with any kind of addiction, find yourself a good group of people to hang out with and to support you.
And I know that's what what Maddie is doing. He's been doing that.
And as far as I know, he's still going to his meeting every day, every morning at seven o'clock.
I went with him one time and just to be there and to hang out and to listen.
Obviously, we couldn't film. That would have been weird and not permitted by the organization.
But it was just an amazing experience for me as someone who, you know, thank God, never struggled with addiction in that way.
But someone and being able to be in the room and observe, it was really special for me.
And I really cherish those moments.
I actually got to go one time with someone who was that was their their meeting and was invited.
And I agree completely. It was exactly the same.
And then when I was there, there was a veteran, there was a first responder and then just conversations with the coffee after got to kind of, you know,
go back and forth and hear some stories and impart some, you know, some information that hopefully might have helped further.
But yeah, I mean, I witnessed the same thing.
It was, you know, there was no rank class, anything.
It was just a group of people trying to support each other, which I think the rest of the nation could learn from.
Yeah. And you know, we're all broken.
And that's the thing that I really appreciated about these folks. They all came.
They were all in the same place. They're all realize that they're broken.
And if we're truly honest, we all are in some way, we're broken because we're human beings.
And if we can learn to admit that and acknowledge that, I think there can be tremendous healing in places that where that brokenness perhaps has been stigmatized.
I can think there could be tremendous healing. And there's a future when we acknowledge our brokenness.
Yes, I'm broken. Yes, you're broken.
But you know what? In spite of that, I'm going to love you.
I want to care for you and I'm going to pick you up when you get beat down.
And I think that's what, you know, people like Desiree need for the people that are we're in her agency, her department to say, okay, she's broken.
Let's help her up. You know, that's what we need.
We need leaders that can step up and say, yeah, my guys, my gals, they're, they're broken.
They're messed up, but we're going to do everything in our power to help them up.
Because that's what a decent human being should do.
Well, that's a good segue to something I was just talking to Matt, he was about, he's actually working on a peer support team at these wildfires in California at the moment.
But I asked him after you retired, because he was on shift, obviously, when he went back to work, how much did sleeping help?
And he said, and I quote, it was everything.
And I think this is why, and I was on your show a few weeks ago.
This is why this also needs to be front and center.
You can't tell someone to lean into their spirituality or, you know, their mindfulness or journal if you're destroying them with 56, 80 hour work weeks.
You know, this, this is the pillar.
And the number of people I've had in the coaching world said, dude, I don't care if you eat like a monk, you know, that you train like a maniac.
If you're not sleeping, it almost doesn't matter what you're putting in your mouth because you just you're breaking everything down.
So this is the other thing is understanding how much the shift work, the sleep deprivation is impacting.
And we have to be awake when everyone's asleep.
That is our job.
And there is, but there are some extremely healthy ways of doing that.
Still not as healthy as being in your own bed every night, but offsetting it by giving them the rest and recovery.
But until we address this, what I call herd of elephants in the room, which is the complete abuse of our first responders.
And they're obviously the trickle down on their relationships and even the health of their offspring.
Then we're missing a huge part.
But this is this is the one that needs courage because you can you can bring in someone and do a little talk on their mental health or you can put an EAP on the on the pin board.
But to actually go to your city and council and say, look, we have to invest this money in our people, which, by the way, will save them a shitload of money anyway.
But at the front, you have to invest it so that the Matties and the Des Rays of the world can do what they're paid to do, but have the rest and recovery for that wrist injury to heal properly for that mental injury to heal properly.
That is another absolutely essential element of this conversation.
Absolutely. And I was talking with a local police officer in the Sheriff's Department a few years ago.
And, you know, he was working shift work.
And he told me that there was times when he literally has to pull over and take a nap, take a nap when he's, you know, working the overnight shift, because he said, I'm afraid I won't get home.
And then when you're, you know, he's on nights one week and evenings the next week and days the following week, he said, I never sleep, I can, I even on the when I'm working days I don't sleep because my schedule is all messed up.
And it's a it's a terrible way to go and I'm I'm very concerned about many people in the first responder community who don't have the sleep.
Because these are the people that are responding to our emergency. These are the people that show up when there's a there's a shooting going on. These are the people who come to, you know, situations where you were perhaps deadly forces required, especially in law enforcement.
And what are they going to do? Are they in the mental, the right mental state to take care of this without perhaps without deadly force? Or are they going to make bad decisions?
And I think that's some of the things that have shown up on the evening news. I can't say that it's directly because they didn't sleep, but I think that plays a role in making bad decisions.
Yeah, well, I mean, we had that fire truck versus train here in Florida a couple weeks ago. And, you know, again, I'm not casting blame judgment. I don't know. I don't know what they're responding to. I think everything's been sealed now.
But I know that we don't normally do that, that that would be extremely ill advised for a first responder. I mean, I can't even think of a situation would be worth the risk.
But I do know that if in a sleep deprived mind, that decision making can be clouded. And so I'd be interested to see, you know, what came out of that in that particular city, I know, was trying to go to the 24 72.
And if I'm not mistaken was having resistance, I don't know if it was from the city themselves. I'm not completely well versed, but I hope this helps, you know, bring that conversation up because yeah, if you know, someone pulls over my son and he reaches nervously into the glove box to get his
insurance, and he gets shot because the sleep deprived officer thinks he was, you know, reaching for a gun, you know, we see all this footage of these intersection wrecks with first responder vehicles and civilians.
You know, there's all these things where and we know that micro sleeps are a real thing. You know, it wasn't that they forgot to yield. It was a literally the engineer was half asleep and blew through the red light, which he wouldn't do well rested, was she.
So yeah, this is, you know, another and you think about, again, financially, or we can't afford it. What is the budgetary amount on that train crash now for that city, millions and millions and millions of dollars.
So it's a false economy, and it's obviously you know you report you so now we're in a first responder crisis when no one wants to do our job anymore.
So we have to turn the ship around, or genuinely some cities and counties won't have EMS fire or police anymore. It's that simple and I'm, and I'm worried what's going to happen to those firefighters on the front lines out in California.
Yeah, I've been on the line for 48 hours or more.
And some of them have been, you know, and that's, there's going to be repercussions for that.
Aside from all the other stuff that's going on all the political mess that's going on out there. The lasers that start in the fires and all that.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's, it's, it's really a tough place for first responders to be and my hats off to first responders, I couldn't do the job.
And I respect anyone willing to go into the first responder community and to do a good job and I always encourage them. Number one, take care of you.
Because you know what, more than likely the department won't.
That's not going to be their focus. They want performance. They want you to do your job. So you're responsible take care of you do whatever you have to do, whether it's you know plan your meals whether you know plan your workout get all that stuff in.
To take care of you go see a therapist if you if you become a police officer if you become a firefighter or a 911 dispatcher sign up for therapy. Just start, start there.
You find someone who's who's you know comparable who works with first responders who understands first responder culture and just go see it there I've seen a therapist, and it's just helpful just to off gas things.
And, you know, I have a therapist who's a former cop, and it's just fun to sit down and talk with him and when something's bothering me. I just share it.
And there's nothing wrong with that and I so I encourage anyone who's going into the first responder space to go find therapy, there's no shame in that.
100%. And like I tell I mean I've been shot this from the rooftops you know also ask yourself why do you not deserve to work 40 hours a week or 42 in this case. Why is the barista okay to tap out of 40, but you 56 and then you get a phone call and now you're 80.
And I'm like seriously I, why do you not deserve to go home to your family, and no one's be able to answer that in eight years. So in that case take that courage that you have sends you into fires it sends you off the side of a building on a rope and apply it to fighting for your
own, your own health and your family's health. Yeah, that's what I want to see in 2025 moral courage.
Absolutely. I mean it takes a lot of courage to jump into a, you know, a, a rig and go after one of them fires out there in Malibu or wherever it takes a lot of courage takes a lot of chutzpah.
You know it takes a lot of chutzpah to call up someone to say hey I think I need to talk to a therapist.
So you, I love that use that same courage and go take care of yourself.
Total tangent, but why you just use the word chutzpah I think it sent me back to your, your origin. One question that I've just been totally curious about and you might be an answer it in a simple sentence but when I think of the Amish communities that are very
self sufficient.
Do they have their own fire departments in the Amish areas is it still a county fire department. Are you aware of what and what a fire responses in the Amish communities.
That's a good question. In the Amish community there they're actually you know also a part of the broader community there and so in some of the more heavy Amish communities, a lot of the volunteer stations are manned by Amish people.
In fact, I was at IACP.
No, IACP.
The firefighting leadership thing.
The I.
The big thing. Oh, the FDIC.
I was at FDIC. And here comes some Amish guys.
It's like, Whoa, here's Amish guys that FDIC. It was really cool to see so in certain communities.
It kind of depends on what brand of Amish you are or how strict your churches, whether they let you do that but yeah there are Amish firefighters that who volunteer in their communities because they know that there's not many other people there that can do this.
And so they volunteer for those kind of I don't think there's any paid.
You know Amish firefighters.
I mean there may be but that's not a typical Amish path for a job.
And what about again just while we're on the Amish subject when I think about the Amish people I'm getting you know like micro lenses of certain things that I can recall.
In my mind they're a healthier community versus you know the kind of corporate Main Street America where you know as we know in statistics we are 70% overweight or obese now.
When you think back were they were they a healthier community because I think of a lot you know less reliance and technology a lot more working with their hands and I would assume probably more whole food as well.
Yes and no, they do a lot. They are very self sufficient in that they grow their own food. They're not relying on the stuff in the box you know coming out of the grocery store.
But on the other hand, you go into an Amish community and you go into an Amish bake sale, you're going to see a lot of overweight ladies.
There's a lot of overweight people in the Amish community and I think there's where and because they're around this and they're on comfort food every day they they make comfort food every single day and so they're not really keen into, you know, a healthier diet.
You know, even in my own family my aunts and uncles you know there's there's a numbers of them who are could lose a few pounds. And so that's something that I've really been aware of just to work hard to stay fit to eat better.
I certainly eat better than I did now that I did when I was a kid.
I eat a lot less of the, you know, more carb rich, you know, comfort food.
But that's really what's in the Amish community is those those carb heavy, you know, steak, potatoes and all those things that kind of help.
And of course then the pastries. I mean, my goodness, Amish bread and donuts and cinnamon rolls. I'm a, and my wife, you know gives me a hard time all the time because I love a good doughnut I love a good cinnamon roll.
And I have to really tamper that down when I'm out and about.
Brilliant. Yeah, unusual tangent but there's a couple of burning questions that we wanted to ask. Normally you don't have people that are connected to the Amish population.
All right, well then circling around to one more kind of area that you talk about the film and we'll go to some closing questions you have and forgive me I forget her name you have a dispatcher on there as well. And that's another, you know, kind of the redheaded stepchild of VMS, but, you know, when you listen to them and I had the Beth Bauer socks on who was the dispatcher one of the dispatchers for the Paradise Fire, the wildfire that killed, you know, it was like 80 something people.
I think 85 people yeah yeah yeah so and she was literally listening to people begging, you know, for someone to come health in and obviously then they get burned over. So she had obviously her mental health struggles.
But when I think about the dispatchers as a whole firstly we just touched on, you know, obesity like the ill health of a lot of our dispatchers, but they start work, you know, probably in the dark, they leave in the dark all day they're in the dark.
They're getting these highly high acuity calls, but I'm like a firefighter where we get to pull hose or, you know, pick up heavy equipment.
You know there's a physical offload as well. They don't have that and then they don't really get closure for a lot of these calls either whereas if I drop off someone at the hospital as a medic, you know I can ask the doctors that the next call I go,
okay, an hour after the last one, you know, hey, how did that that guy do or that lady do. So, talk to me about that we know you again that Pandora's box, what you discovered about that particular role.
Yeah, you know when I was first working on developing this film that wasn't on my radar.
The 911 community was nowhere on my radar until I had a conversation with our local president of our local fire company.
And he was, he said well have you thought about 911.
I was like, well no tell me about that. He said well I'm a dispatcher in my day job.
We hear it, we imagine it, we don't get closure. It's a problem.
And so that really brought me to oh yeah we got to include 911 in this thing so we started, I started research on that and as they would kind of put the word out on the street that hey we're looking for someone in the 911 community to be a part of this film.
And a friend of mine in Kansas City reached out, and she, she's a, she's a leader in the 911 community out there and she reached out and she said hey I think we have someone for you.
And her name is Nicole.
So I did what I always do I sent it off to Nancy, Nancy here's here's Nicole's number give her a call, have a zoom meeting with her. And again when Nancy got off the phone. She said, this girl is amazing.
And she was. I got to meet her I've got to go up to Boston, she had been a part of the Boston Marathon bombing event.
She was involved in some other police involved shootings that she managed the calls, and very interesting story and then I, we got connected to some of the leaders.
In fact, the leading researcher in 911 trauma is Dr. Michelle Lilly, out of the Northern University of Northern Illinois University I believe that's where she's at.
She has some of the original studies on the impact of trauma on 911 dispatchers, and so we got connected with her, did an interview with her.
And then from there we got kind of connected to other people in the 911 community who are leaders and just discovered that this is a major problem.
And as you said they sit in the dark, they, they sit, which is a big issue and it's fortunately now a lot of the the the console companies are making these these desks that can stand that are stand up desk and push a button and it comes up, which is really
good. But they often then, you know they have a call that is perhaps, you know, typical call.
You know, there's, you know, a heart patient is feeling heart has chest pains, so they dispatch the ambulance.
Next call can be you know the neighbor's dogs barking too much and, and they have to go take care of that. And then there's a call for, you know, there's a guy with a gun.
So that kind of brings it up a little bit.
They get off that call to dispatch it, and they don't even get a break before the next phone rings, especially in the busier centers.
And so there's not a chance to decompress after a traumatic call.
And that just happens over, you know, unless you have a good boss who recognizes, hey, I think you need to step back for take a break.
After that traumatic call because these dispatch centers, especially the larger ones, they all kind of listen into each other's calls, especially if they hear something traumatic happening, they can they can tap that line and they can listen into, you know, John over here who's taking the
traumatic call, they can listen in and if the boss is a good boss, they can go over and say hey john, take a break.
Go out, you know, catch a breath, take your time, but oftentimes, maybe they're short staff and they can't take a break.
And so it just, again, you know, continues to pile on that those traumatic things and it becomes a major problem in the 911 community and Nicole was no exception to that and.
She went through, you know, different agencies to even move from one agency to another to try to maybe figure out something better.
Even then, kind of left 911 for a time, went to dispatch cement trucks.
She was dreadfully bored, dispatching concrete trucks.
Guys getting lost you know under the word on to the, you know, she had to kind of figure out where they were. And she was like no I gotta go back to 911 and then that ended up
causing additional trauma to her.
And after she came to our premiere and in Texas was doing amazing.
Still struggling with some things.
She told me a few months later that she's going to move back to to Maine, and what she did. She was in South Dakota at the time.
And it was she moved back to to Maine in May of 23.
No, yeah, and may have 23.
And in August of 23 she took her own life.
And realize that.
It was absolutely a devastating situation here she is in my film, telling her story, hopeful, helping others.
And that was a hard call to get.
And the way I found out about it it was, it was just bizarre I saw a post on on YouTube.
Someone said RIP Nicole.
And I was like what.
And so I called her mom.
Or like no I called Nicole because the only number I had.
I sent her a text and said hey just checking on you, making sure you're good.
And her mom called me and gave me the news.
And that was in August of 23 then I was asked to come up and speak at her memorial service up in Maine.
And it was a reminder that just because someone looks well, says all the right things, doesn't mean they are.
And it was a reminder to to reach out.
And something that that someone else in the film Dr. Phil Bacui has has has told me this and when he speaks he often he often gives us as a prompt and action step.
Says take out your phone.
And he did this in a seminar I was at he said take out your phone and right now send a text message to three people.
The first three people you think of just send him a text message, hey I'm thinking about you.
He's hoping the best for you.
He says you never know what that will do to get someone who's maybe on the edge to come back.
And it was just a reminder for me that yeah Nicole seemed to have all her ducks in a row and seemed to be in a good spot.
And for a while she was.
And, but she wasn't.
And now, the amazing thing, her family loves the fact that she was part of this film.
They support it 100% in fact they hosted a screening in her hometown, and her honor.
That was a little tough.
We actually had Maddie come out and Desiree came up with me, we all were there together, spent, we actually stayed with her family, and just had a fantastic time together.
Just in talking about Nicole and just remembering her sense of humor she was very funny and just had a.
She had some words that she liked to use a lot. Sometimes, four letter words, and quite a colorful, quite a colorful language.
And, but we just had a great time but it was a week after her memorial service that we had a film screening in Pennsylvania.
And I was like how in the world do I talk about this.
And the last credit in the credits of the film the last thing we see she's doing great.
So we ended up now changing that last and put it in memoriam as the final thing.
And at the end of the film, and in the meantime I had connected with this guy who hooked me up with a leading suicide ologist I didn't know there was such a thing.
We talked to this guy we talked about how to process this and how to tell this story in a public setting and.
And that was literally I was outside the venue, talking to this guy on the phone. We went in shared the film.
I talked about Nicole, and this guy comes up to me afterwards he says, Hey, I just want you to know that Nicole saved my life.
I was like, please tell me.
He's like well a few years ago. She was on a podcast, and she told her story.
And she told her story of how she reached out to get help. He said I was in a very bad place.
And it motivated me inspired me to go get help.
I'm in a much better place today. And it's because of her.
Even in her death.
Her story is still important.
Her story is still alive. Her story is still impacting people's lives.
And we're now using that just as a way of, hey, let's, let's.
We have more motivation to help others to prevent those kind of things happening.
So tragic. There was another documentary, The Weight of Gold, which followed all these elite athletes.
And it was talking about the same kind of thing.
Loss of purpose, loss of tribe. It was such a beautiful parallel to the first responders in the military professions.
And there was, I think he was a wrestler who they had been following.
And it was the same thing, like in the duration of the filming, he took his own life.
And then I just watched the documentary on Avicii, who's an EDM DJ.
And it was again, highs and lows. But it's now eight years of these conversations, over a thousand guests.
I am in no way, shape or form an expert in anything.
But I've heard so many experts and so many life stories now that you start to look at it so forensically and realizing.
And people use it's complicated as a way of kind of, you know, refusing to do anything about it.
It's dismissive, that term. Oh, it's complicated. It's nuanced, you know.
But once you identify all the pieces, like Jenga, you can start addressing them. You can start moving them around.
And so, for example, in our profession, oh, Nicole, it was the Boston bombing. It was that officer-involved shooting.
But maybe, I mean, that was part of it. That was just some of the Jenga blocks. But what happened when you were young?
Did you feel supported by your department or like Desiree, did you feel betrayed?
You know, were you taking psych meds? Were there side effects of those? I mean, there's so many parts.
And what's encouraging is if we can have a conversation and really put all these pieces on the table, people can start looking through and go, oh, I didn't think about this bit or this bit or this bit.
But if we're just like, oh, it's what you've seen, then we're losing a lot of these people.
I mean, Avicii, you could see playing his day. Here was a young man who loved music and the fame that came with it removed his autonomy.
And I would argue as well, when do DJs play at night? There was probably a sleep deprivation element to that too, along with, you know, ecstasy and whatever, you know, was being taken as well.
But I think equally and oppositely, you have identifying these risk factors or these contributing factors. Now, there's also this vast tapestry of healing, whether it's warrior retreats, whether it's equine or canine therapy, whether it's psychedelics, MDMA.
I mean, there's so many things now. And I think this is the next step. This is the next chapter in the first responder, mental health, especially, but just in mental health in general, is taking that 10,000 foot view of the holistic human being, not just focusing, well, you were at the Vegas shooting.
That's why you must be struggling, but also saying there's more than just talk therapy and psych meds. There's all these things. And this EMDR might help you with the Boston bombing. But, you know, the therapeutic animal element might be what you need for, you know, the kind of death by a thousand cuts.
And maybe the psychedelic therapy will help you find forgiveness for what your father did or whatever the things are. So it's exciting that we can look at this, you know, this very diverse element of each of these.
But that's where we need to push it. We kind of got stuck on smash the stigma. Well, smash the stigma doesn't get you anywhere other than just stop people being a dick about people that are suffering. What we need to do now is unpack how you are suffering and then get you excited and hopeful by saying you have your own cocktail, your own recipe of healing that will work for you.
So let's start exploring that. Let's get you, you know, on that post-traumatic growth trail. So one day you'll be that person helping other people.
I'm going to tease you with one thing and you should look into this and you should have this guy on your podcast. I don't know if you know the name Dan Jarvis.
Doesn't ring a bell. So he has a thing called the trauma resiliency protocol and it is from everything that I've seen. It works hands down better than anything else that I've seen.
I know because he used it on me.
I was having nightmares about something and for in 20 minutes he sat at my kitchen table.
And in 20 minutes.
Those nightmares are gone. I've not had one since.
And he has he right now is in the middle of a big study with several universities where they're testing this and they're doing brain scans and they're doing this protocol.
Then they're doing brain scans afterwards and they're going to be releasing a white paper sometime later this year or into next year once the study is done.
But it's amazing. So trauma resiliency protocol Dan Jarvis. I can connect you offline and I think to be someone fascinating for you to have on your show to talk about what he's doing.
Beautiful. Thank you. All right. Well then speaking of solutions we before we hit record. We talked about you know I asked you about the potential of a second part of the PTSD 911 documentary and you really explained that the podcast that you have now.
First Responder Wellness podcast is kind of in place of a sequel where you're actually able to to bring solutions to these problems now so talk to me about that. You finished the film you're doing some of the in the releases in these different areas.
What made you decide to do a podcast.
Originally we started the podcast or I started the podcast as a way to get eyeballs on the film. I thought it's just another tool to and it was had a different name at the time, while I was in production.
And then once really production got going I had to like okay I can't continue the podcast during production because it's just it's a time suck, as you know.
And so once the film got done I was like you know what I really need to resurrect this thing back, rebrand it and launch it and to get some of these people that are not only in the film but other people that I've been connected to onto the show to talk about
solutions.
And so that's what I really feel that the podcast does is I bring experts to the mic.
There's a lot of podcasts that and I don't have anything against these that bring first responders on tell their story. Great. Awesome.
So my show is not like that my show is a bring experts on, and many are first responders or former first responders, but I really focus on what worked for you.
What is the solution that worked for you to get you to a better place. And, and not only, you know, physical health, mental health, spiritual health.
We talk about financial health I had a financial guy on here a couple weeks ago.
And so, it's, it's been amazing to see it grow we're, you know, we're, we're not there yet I'm not at your numbers yet James, but we're, we're getting, you know, we're heading in the right direction and so got some amazing people coming up in the near future.
Last week I had Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman on, which he's, you know, well known and he's always a always a fascinating guy to talk to and to hear and he talks a lot about sleep.
In fact, in a couple of weeks I'm doing an interview with the guy just reached out on on LinkedIn.
Former Special Forces guy that is has is all about sleep. And, so, yes, yes, maybe seal. Yep.
I don't remember his last name. Sorry, Rob. I'm just brain fart. But yeah, yeah. So he's going to be on the show we're going to record an episode here in a couple weeks so looking forward to that.
But yeah, the podcast is really there to, to kind of continue that conversation that the film does. And to to bring more solutions to the table.
I am doing gradually connecting with some of the people in the film and doing updates. I have an interview that I, if you remember in the film there was a kind of a crusty old detective from Garland PD talks about is his six years of, you know, his
career in the film asked for six years. Yes. And so we recorded a podcast with him a couple weeks ago so we're going to bring an update for him. And I'm going to have Maddie back on the show sometime soon to kind of update us on what he's doing.
And, and I'm trying to get Desiree on the show too, just to being able to talk about where she's at. And so that's been a fun part too and we're launching this month we're launching a monthly live series.
And so the last Friday of every month, I'm doing a live podcast broadcast at 12 noon Eastern time, you have to sign up.
It's going to be on zoom. So it's going to be interactive.
My first guest is Dr. Phil Bacui.
So he's going to be on this January 31 at 12 noon, and there's signups on our website, you just look for the live button and you can sign up and people can join the conversation and and have some interaction there with my guests so we're trying that and there might be a
future live in person conference coming up or exploring those options and we'll see what all happens.
Beautiful. So for people listening, we said that thing once the first responder wellness podcast so where can they find that.
It is anywhere you listen to podcast, Apple, Spotify, all the, all the typical podcast platforms, as well as on YouTube, the YouTube version comes out a few days after the audio version comes out I'm trying that to see if the audience if we grow the audience
there because it's really two different audiences, but, but yeah, all the typical podcast platforms just go and search first responder wellness podcast, and you will find it.
I also want to encourage if you are a first responder leader within your department and your agencies perhaps your peer support leader.
We have our film PTSD 911 is available as a toolkit for your agencies. We've had more than 130 agencies across the country have purchased the film and are using it for training within their departments and so I encourage you to go ptsd911movie.com.
And you can find out more information there about that and we're also planning events all over the country we've got screenings coming up in various cities and my goal is to hit 25 cities this year for screening events so if you want to host us, go to the website and and learn more about it.
Brilliant. Well I watched it on Amazon I think it costs a whopping three bucks to watch it so for people that you know want to just watch it right now. You've got Amazon where else is there as far as streaming.
It's on Amazon and for international sales it's also on Vimeo, V-I-M-E-O. You can find it there. And, but that's that's the only kind of place I'm kind of all my films are on Amazon, all my other films are there. And so I kind of keep that as my platform of choice.
However, I'm not sure when this is coming out but January 22, the film airs for the first time on Maryland Public Television. So the film will be on NPT January 22, and it'll be available through their platform.
It's an edited version because I had to cut it down to under an hour. So, but the NPT is going to host it for a year on their platforms as well so I'm very excited about that public broadcast here locally.
It's amazing.
All right, I want to say thank you so much. I mean firstly for you know some of the areas that we've talked about today but also for being part of the solution in my community, whether it's the filmmaking or now the podcast. So I want to thank you so so much for being so generous with your time and coming on the Behind the Shield podcast today.
It's been an honor and a privilege. Thank you for having me James it's it's great to see you again, and I wish you the best.