My name's Andy O'Hara and I'm a retired police officer. We sell police mental health for cops.

My career ended at 24 years with severe PTSD and a near suicide. After a lengthy recovery, I felt the need to do something, share something, work with someone, to help officers avoid my same fate. From that came the non-profit organization, "Badge of Life." The primary mission of the Badge of Life Program is to assist law enforcement officers in the United States and Canada to maintain the highest possible quality of life in their careers. Our goal is to provide free assistance and materials from which officers can be trained to deal effectively with stress and emotional trauma long before reaching a crisis level.

141 police suicides occurred in 2008 (O'Hara/Violanti)and 143 in 2009. We believe this number can be reduced. But we also believe it's "Not just about suicide." For every suicide, we believe, there are hundreds of other officers out there still working and suffering from the pain of their experiences and trauma.

THIS is what our training must turn to--the living, not the dead. Instead of standing at the cliff, waving a sign that says, "Don't jump," we need to get to our officers before they feel they need to jump in the first place.

Why haven't we? Because we're too lazy. It's much to easy to play helpless, to say there's "nothing we can do. "Darn, we hadda program and he didn't use it."

It's time to wake up and quit sitting on our hands.


Visit our website at http://www.badgeoflife.com/ Your thoughts and your help are welcomed.

Dare to do something new.