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Comment by switchbak | Hacker News Reader

How about: raging PTSD? A former buddy of mine had that like crazy, and apparently it's rampant in the profession (of course it is!).

Also, they (BC Ambulance) treat you like garbage when you need assistance, and effectively force you back to work or to go find a job elsewhere.

It's shocking how badly we treat the people that willingly take on life's hardest challenges (for low pay, I might add). It's amazing any are even left after all that BS.

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> need assistance, and effectively force you back to work

As a former PTSD therapist, there's a lot more overlap between these two than you might expect.

Often (not always, some people are great suppressors) the worst thing you can do as a trauma survivor is continually avoid the source of trauma.

Sure, but it's very context dependent, and that statement isn't particularly useful here devoid of that context.

What I'm implying is that in a profession with high PTSD rates, the culture of "get back in the saddle" peer pressure is probably generally better than, say, a typical "detached professionalism" or even a "self-care" oriented culture.

Yes. Generally speaking, but we’re individuals not populations.

Unfortunately that was not the case here, and his untreated PTSD left him very vulnerable to the effects of additional traumatic (work) experiences. He really needed a career change, but kept getting pushed back into service. With little in the way of effective treatment, it was hard to watch him being treated like that.

Low pay is better than no pay. We still have a few decades before robots can do CPR.

We already have a machine that can do CPR very well. What we don't yet have is a robot that can enter an unfamiliar environment and safely extract a patient who may have other injuries or be entrapped.

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