CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, Va. — “Break Each Chain” is a brand new movie that tells the story of a Virginia police officer’s battle with alcoholism, despair, and devastating loss and the way counseling and religion turned his life round.
It’s primarily based on the inspiring true story of Jonathan Hickory, a Charlottesville-area police officer.
Now touring the nation and debuting the movie for police teams and regulation enforcement households, Hickory hopes his story will assist others battling psychological well being and substance abuse points.
“I actually suppose it’s going to achieve and converse to lots of people and alter quite a lot of lives,” Hickory says.
When Hickory joined the police drive on the age of 23, he says the joy of a brand new job, together with dedication to public service, made his life fulfilling.
When he married the love of his life a number of months later, Hickory mentioned he felt on high of the world.
Nonetheless, inside a number of years of his profession, Hickory says the calls for of police work started to set off emotions from the previous.
“Once I was youthful, I skilled some childhood trauma,” Hickory says. “I misplaced my father on the age of 12 and by no means actually confronted that.”
As time handed, Hickory says his nightmares grew worse, particularly after he was assigned to a brand new division within the police division.
“I grew to become a deadly crash reconstruction officer, and I used to be actually beginning to see much more loss of life and coping with these households and it was actually taking its toll on me,” Hickory says. “ I believed I used to be the one one struggling and that I used to be someway damaged or weak or completely different.”
Hickory says he turned to alcohol to assist him cope along with his feelings and that’s when his private {and professional} life started to spiral downward.
“I used to be at my all-time low, the worst, the heaviest, darkest time in my total life,” Hickory says. “It was Could of 2015 that I nearly took my very own life. There was a sequence of occasions that I wrote about in my e-book that led me to the purpose the place I simply didn’t really feel that there was another resolution, aside from taking my very own life.”
Hickory’s story displays a rising, however silent epidemic on this nation. In keeping with Blue H.E.L.P, a psychological well being group for law enforcement officials, practically 90 officers within the U.S. have died by suicide this 12 months.
Chesterfield Police Chief Col. Jeffrey Katz, says suicide is a devastating actuality within the regulation enforcement neighborhood, the place society expects officers to be “super-human,” and repair each drawback.
“You attempt like mad to ask your self how can we forestall this? What else can we do? What else may we now have finished,” Katz says.
Katz says he’s regularly working in his division to alter the damaging stigma that always prevents many first responders from looking for assist after they face psychological well being challenges.
“It’s a profound accountability, however there are feelings tied to it and we now have to study to take care of these feelings,” Katz says. “As a result of in the event you don’t establish the sensation, you possibly can’t handle and deal with it and so in the event you preserve suppressing it, it’s going to return out, however not in your phrases.”
In Chesterfield, a devoted wellness coordinator makes positive that officers have entry to division psychologists, chaplains, train applications and peer help teams. Nonetheless, Katz says some officers are reluctant to make use of the sources obtainable to them, for the worry of being judged.
“We now have to lean on one another and we now have to be prepared to be susceptible,” Katz says. “That’s the true message I wish to ensure persons are getting. In a time the place society appears so indignant quite a lot of the time, it’s troublesome to say ‘I’m going to make myself susceptible,’ however that’s what braveness is about, that’s what energy is about, that’s what confidence is about.”
Hickory says permitting himself to be susceptible took quite a lot of time and therapeutic. Whereas he admitted the reality to friends in a males’s help group at his church, Hickory says he initially excluded a key part in his restoration.
“One factor I initially unnoticed of the e-book was that I noticed a police psychologist for 5 – 6 months,” Hickory says. “However I left it out as a result of I used to be so ashamed.”
Hickory says he’s since re-edited his e-book in order that others know there’s all the time hope in despair and that there isn’t any disgrace in reaching out for assist. He says his e-book and the movie are true reflections of his life.
“I actually really feel God laid it on my coronary heart at that second,” Hickory says. “It’s altering lives and it’s making a distinction.”
This section is sponsored by WHOA Behavioral Well being.