Firefighters battling PTSD alone and in silence

Distress

In June, a 19-year-old woman surnamed Li jumped off a building in the downtown area of a city in the northwestern province of Gansu.

The heartless reactions of passers-by, who stopped to film the event on their smartphones, and a prolonged rescue attempt by firefighters, sparked heated discussion online.

A firefighter named Cheng Wei held the young woman's hands tightly for several hours as he tried to persuade her to abandon the suicide attempt. Eventually, however, she broke free from his grip and jumped to her death, causing another young firefighter at the scene to burst into tears.

Afterward, Cheng, a team leader at the local fire station, said the incident had caused him great distress and even led him to punch a wall several times. The young firefighter, who has just got married, is receiving psychological counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, aka PTSD.

In 2015, Chen Fang, a psychologist in Beijing, founded a counseling center to provide mass psychological intervention after an explosion at a chemical warehouse in Tianjin claimed 165 lives, including 99 firefighters, and left eight people missing.

She said almost 20 percent of the people who attend the Herun Mental Health Service Center are firefighters, so she understands how the woman's suicide triggered Cheng's PTSD.

She believes that the nature of their work can cause extreme mental instability in firefighters.

"PTSD is a constantly growing problem," she said. "What's more serious is that a lot of firefighters don't realize that they have the disorder."

According to data released by the International Association of Fire Fighters, almost 20 percent of firefighters in the United States and Canada had PTSD in 2016, compared with 3.5 percent of the general population.

Chen said PTSD is now endemic among firefighters in China.

The symptoms may include flashbacks, feelings related to troubling events, avoiding incidents that can trigger trauma, and a rise in stress reaction that can last for more than a month.

Wei Hongchen, a 25-year-old team leader at the fire bureau in Wangjing, clearly remembers the first time he saw a dead body.

When Wei arrived at the scene of an explosion in the northeastern Beijing suburb of Zuojiazhuang that left two people dead and eight injured, an advance team of firefighters had almost cleared the scene, but one body remained.

Wei, who was a 21-year-old trainee at the time, had never seen a dead body, and he and his colleagues were curious. When a white sheet appeared in front of them, the firefighters couldn't resist opening it.

The acrid smell of burned flesh was overpowering, and the sight of the body shocked Wei. "It was a strong person who had been about 1.8 meters tall. He had been reduced to only about 1 meter in length," he recalled.

"At that moment, I realized how vulnerable we all are."

He also clearly recalls a failed attempt to save the lives of two men trapped in the cabin of a truck carrying about 70 metric tons of vegetables that collided with a car on the Jingcheng Expressway near the capital.

A lack of equipment meant Wei and his colleagues spent about 60 minutes using their bare hands to remove the spilled vegetables and get to the men.

The men were very weak, but one of them tried to talk with the firefighters.

"We spoke with him during the cleanup operation, but about 10 minutes before we managed to drag them out of the truck he stopped talking. They were dead when we got them out of the truck. We didn't see any injuries on their bodies, so they probably died from internal injuries," Wei said.

At home, he seldom talks about his work and daily experiences. "I don't want my parents to worry about me too much. I want to take care of things by myself, he said.