CHICAGO _ A dozen or so police officers gather once every month in the basement of an office building and talk _ about handling holidays with families, about nightmares so bad they are reluctant to share a bed at night.
Most of the officers were involved in a shooting while on duty, and here they share stories of what that has meant. Sometimes they cry.
"This is what trauma looks like," says Carrie Steiner, a former Chicago cop turned therapist who runs the counseling center. "This is what PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) looks like."
Responding to that trauma is now a top challenge for the Chicago Police Department, where alarms are sounding after six officers killed themselves over the last eight months.
Last week, after the most recent suicide, Superintendent Eddie Johnson convened a small meeting of command staff and told them officer wellness was now his priority. To keep neighborhoods safe, his officers need to be healthy, he told the group.
Johnson formed a task force to examine the department's mental health services, according to his spokesman, Anthony Guglielmi, who was at the meeting.
And in a sign of changing attitudes, Johnson also sent his officers a note about the latest death, saying, "we must do everything we can to ensure that our fellow officers have the support needed to get through the challenges of this very difficult job."
Such acknowledgment of suicide among the ranks _ even in private messages to his officers _ is something Johnson has started doing only recently, Guglielmi said.
All this comes two years after the U.S. Justice Department warned the department that its care of officers was severely lacking.
Now, with the loss of six officers by suicide since last summer, national experts are calling for immediate action to understand what is going on and what needs to be done.
"It's definitely worrying and suggestive of a problem I think really demands attention," said Florida State University professor Thomas Joiner, a leading researcher on suicide who was in Chicago this week for a forum on suicide in law enforcement.
