http://www.torontosun.com/news/columnists/mark_bonokoski/2010/03/11/13198086.htmlNews Columnists / Mark Bonokoski
Stress is a killer
By MARK BONOKOSKI, Toronto Sun
Last Updated: March 11, 2010 4:44pm
Within the next two weeks, Toronto Police Association president Mike McCormack plans to sit down with Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair and, if all goes well, the force will hopefully take a huge step into the 21st century.
And it will begin with the name of the late Eddie Adamson, son of a former Toronto police chief, being added to the Toronto Police Honour Roll as having died in the line of duty, and with the post-traumatic stress disorder that ultimately killed him finally losing the career-stifling stigma that keeps it in hiding.
As reported here last year, Eddie Adamson, son of former Metro Toronto police chief Harold Adamson, went to a motel in Simcoe County in October 2005 and took his own life — his room littered with his police notebooks from the day that incalculably changed his life forever, and with the newspaper clippings that documented that day’s horrific events.
While it was no doubt a gun that ended Eddie Adamson’s life and forced his early retirement, what truly loaded that weapon was the cumulative effect of what happened on March 14, 1980 — 30 years ago this Sunday —when Toronto Const. Michael Sweet, a father of three young girls, was shot, held hostage, and allowed to bleed out by the infamous Munro brothers during a fumbled robbery of George’s Bourbon St. bistro on Queen St. W.
One of those brothers, triggerman Craig Munro, has another parole hearing scheduled for next Tuesday.
What sad irony is that?
Sgt. Ed Adamson headed up the Emergency Task Force on the day Sweet died. He wanted to storm the restaurant, knowing Sweet was wounded and likely on death’s door.
But he was ordered to stand down.
And obeying that order haunted him to his grave.
This can no longer be denied.
The Workplace Safety and Insurance Board finally caught up with the 21st century itself by ruling last year that Adamson’s death was not simply brought on by a bullet from a gun but from post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) triggered by the guilt he felt each day for the last years of his life for not disobeying the order to stand down and, instead, storming the bistro to save 30-year-old Michael Sweet’s life.
By the time Adamson was given the good-to-go order, and led the assault on the restaurant, the sound of gunshots filling the air, Michael Sweet had already slipped away.
But there was Adamson, nonetheless, so overcome by the tear gas that he eventually had to be hospitalized, trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a fellow officer who was already lying dead because they got there too late.
It was a horror he could never shake.
Old-school terminology wrote him off as suffering from “burnout” or “battle fatigue,” and promoted the fallacy that it could be shaken off if one’s mind were put to it.
But WSIB appeals adjudicator Mark Evans ruled — and ruled definitively— that Eddie Adamson “suffered an acute post-traumatic reaction” from being too late to save Const. Michael Sweet’s life because of that “stand down” order being obeyed and that, from that day onward, the slippery slope to his suicide was medically understandable, clinically explainable, and therefore virtually predictable.
As police assocation president Mike McCormack said, “Eddie Adamson’s case is a template of a death brought on by work-related post-traumatic stress disorder.
“He should be honoured with his name on the wall.”
Two weeks ago, the Globe & Mail dedicated almost a full page to “the untold perils of policing,” and how the Toronto Police Service is now starting to address the post-traumatic stress disorders that “quietly afflicts” so many police officers.
Last month, Chief Blair addressed the issue of mental health and posted it on the force’s internal network — stating the time had come to adapt to the “changing needs of the organization, with an enduring commitment to health and wellness.”
Suicide among police officers is not rare and, although not all can be directly attributed to PTSD, many are.
According to a recent article by retired Toronto cop Colin Davies, posted on the police retirees’ website, there were 22 recorded Toronto Police suicides between 1975 and 2006 and then, in 2007, there were four — two officers, one civilian employee, and one auxiliary officers.
This does not mean, of course, that all — or any — deserve to have their names on the police honour roll.
But none can arguably compete with the special circumstances that added up to Eddie Adamson’s death.
Two weeks ago, at a police service east of Toronto, a 29-year-old officer, a father of two young children, took his own life in the gun-storage room of his detachment.
His story, of course, did not make the news.
mark.bonokoski@sunmedia.ca
