Self-resilience as a protective factor against development of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in police officers

• Published in: Annals of occupational and environmental medicine Vol. 28; no. 1; pp. 58 - 7
• Main Authors: Lee, Jong-Ku, Choi, Hyeon-Gyeong, Kim, Jae-Yeop, Nam, Juhyun, Kang, Hee-Tae, Koh, Sang-Baek, Oh, Sung-Soo
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London BioMed Central 17.10.2016; BioMed Central Ltd; XMLink, Co; 대한직업환경의학회
• Subjects: Health aspects; Medicine; Medicine & Public Health; Mental depression; Mental disorders; Occupational health; Occupational Medicine/Industrial Medicine; Occupational stress; Police; Post traumatic stress disorder; Public Health; Regression analysis; Research Article; Resilience (Personality trait); Risk factors; Working conditions; 예방의학; Job stress; Post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms; Police officer; Resilience
• ISSN: 2052-4374; 2052-4374
• DOI: 10.1186/s40557-016-0145-9

Background This study was conducted to check whether self-resilience, one of the characteristics known to affect the occurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms after experiencing traumatic events, could serve as a protective factor for police officers whose occupational factors are corrected. Methods We conducted a cross-sectional study in which 112 male police officers in Gangwon Province participated. They visited the Wonju Severance Christian Hospital Occupational Environment Center for medical check-ups from June to December 2015. Their general characteristics were identified using structured questionnaires, and they were asked to fill in the Korean Occupational Stress Scale-Short Form (KOSS-SF). Further, the Center for Epidemiologic Studies-Depression Scale (CES-D), Connor–Davidson Resilience Scale-Korean (CD-RI-K), and Impact of Event Scale-Revised-Korean version (IES-R-K) were used to evaluate their job stress, depression, self-resilience, and PTSD symptoms. Logistic regression analysis was conducted to correct their personal, occupational, and psychological factors to analyze the relationship between self-resilience and PTSD symptoms. Results Among 112 respondents who experienced a traumatic event, those with low self-resilience had significantly higher rate of PTSD symptoms than those with high self-resilience even after correcting for the covariate of general, occupational, and psychological characteristics (odds ratio [OR] 3.51; 95 % CI: 1.06–19.23). Conclusions Despite several limitations, these results suggest that a high degree of self-resilience may protect police officers from critical incident-related PTSD symptoms.