Former cop Ryan Jeffcoat writes kids’ book on PTSD to help others
He notched up more than 800 arrests over a 14-year career in the NSW Police Force — until one day Detective Senior Constable Ryan Jeffcoat snapped. But a conversation with his young daughter Maddison helped change things for the better.
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Ryan Jeffcoat was conducting surveillance on a drug operation in November 2012 when he saw flames shooting from a house in his rear-view mirror.
With a fellow detective, he raced from his car, braved the smoke and dragged a heavily-pregnant woman to safety.
That night as the woman went into labour, Jeffcoat and his partner, still recovering from smoke inhalation, were back arresting a coke dealer.
“We just went back to work and got on with our drug operation,” Jeffcoat, who notched up 808 arrests over a high-tempo career lasting 14 years — or about one arrest a week, said.
But eventually he deteriorated — at home he snapped at his children, grew increasingly depressed, and became a person nobody wanted to be around.
Now retired from the police force, he’s using his experience to channel an unexpected new calling: children’s author.
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Cranky Pants: A Conversation about PTSD is Jeffcoat’s first attempt at writing for the children of police officers, paramedics, soldiers, doctors, and anyone else whose occupation is overexposed to tragedy and trauma.
Coupling high-quality illustrations with the quirky couplets of a Dr Seuss fable, the book is the first to try explain the confusion and loneliness of PTSD in the simple language of children. In many cases the pictures tell the story — an off-duty cop reliving the grief of a traffic incident; a comforting wife powerless to help; a forlorn little girl staring out a window wondering what she’s done wrong.
“There’s no real reference tool for children,” Jeffcoat, who left the Force in December with severe and chronic symptoms of PTSD, said.
“In this very specialised area of PTSD, the focus is always on the individual going through the trauma, which it should be — but the families are forgotten about.”
Jeffcoat said the idea for the book was coined by his eight-year-old daughter, Maddison. She saw her father at his worst — withdrawn, agitated, quick to anger, and generally unpleasant. She became troublesome in the classroom and declined academically.
Believing she was the cause of his anger, she confronted her father one day.
“She said, ‘Are you ever going to be my normal dad again, or are you going to be a cranky pants with hair?’” Jeffcoat said.
The NSW Police Force does not have readily-available data on how PTSD affects its officers, but anecdotally the problem is rampant. Last month the Police Association of NSW said 300 officers are discharged each year with psychological injuries stemming from PTSD.
A separate analysis by Blue HOPE, a not-for-profit support service, found that 63 police officers took their lives between 2001 and 2010 for the same reason.
Cranky Pants, released on April 25, is available for pre-order via www.olympiapublishers.com/books/cranky-pants
A spokesman for the NSW Police Force said preventive and early intervention strategies were a priority, and that existing programs were being “constantly monitored and strengthened”.
Jeffcoat said his experience wasn’t defined by a single incident, but repeated contact with distressing scenes: a young girl run over at her preschool by a drug-affected uncle; a four-year-old boy, Bailey Constable, bashed to death by his mother’s boyfriend; a call-out in which he faced off with a knife-wielding man in a locked bedroom; and years spent at the Middle Eastern Organised Crime Squad, where he and others dealt exclusively with some of the state’s most aggressive and volatile criminals.
Almost nightly his team would embark on search warrants so dangerous that injury or death became a routine consideration. These were carried out with minimal body armour, against targets often monitored by national security agencies.
In 2014 the NSW Police Force overhauled its search warrant policies with these circumstances in mind.
“We were doing a lot of work that we shouldn’t have been doing,” Jeffcoat said.
“It wasn’t a bad thing — it’s why I joined the cops. But policy-wise they’ve tightened things up and accepted that the stuff we were doing, we shouldn’t have been doing.”
Psychologists say this build-up of trauma is typical in police officers, in large part because of the stigma still associated with seeking help. Leah Dodsworth, a psychologist based in Wagga Wagga who regularly treats PTSD sufferers, including Jeffcoat, said family breakdown was the other consequence of the disorder, calling children and spouses the “unacknowledged victims of PTSD”.
“It is very hard for families to understand the changes they see in their loved ones,” she said. “Family breakdown is an all too common symptom of the ripple effect of PTSD.”
This is the reason Jeffcoat cites for writing the book, but his other hope is to encourage adults to seek help. “We don’t always have to be alpha male police officers,” he said. “We can talk about what’s happened. We can express emotion. Had that been taught to me early in my career, if mental health issues had been destigmatised, I probably would still be in the police.”
Originally published as Former cop Ryan Jeffcoat writes kids’ book on PTSD to help others
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