I was the research officer in a home ministry sponsored multi-centred study on mental health problems among police personnel. Some of the findings of this study are relevant, given the fact that there have been of late several tragic incidents of police personnel turning violent because of personal or professional stress. The study found that over 50 per cent of police personnel suffered from mental health problems, the most common of them being depression, anxiety, and alcohol abuse. The major causes of these disorders were not the pressures of being a policeman but rather the uncaring and unsympathetic attitude of the superiors to the needs and requirements of junior officers.Significantly, at the time of the study, the police departments did not have any in-house psychiatrists to tackle the pernicious problem. The recent incident of a constable posted at Mumbai’s international airport shooting dead his deputy commandant, along with that of another policeman committing a joint homicide-suicide, brings to light in an extremely unpleasant and bloody manner the way our policemen sometimes suffer. The negative public attitude to police personnel in general does not help either. We need more studies of this kind to help us understand better the tensions under which our police personnel function.
