WHEN John Bale, the co-founder and former CEO of Soldier On, saw a gap in the mental health support services for the national security community, he decided it deserved an independent, not-for-profit organisation of its own. 

With this in mind, John, 36, of Belconnen, under the organisation of Fortem Australia, recently launched the pilot mental health program for the national security community of Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne at the Emergency Services Agency in Canberra.

Originally, John, who is still a board member at Soldier On, says he looked at supporting police and security personnel, emergency service workers and first-responder communities through Soldier On. 

“At Soldier On, we found that we were supporting a lot of veterans who moved into the Australian Police Force or the Australian Border Force,” he says.

“What we wanted to do is provide services for all APF and ABF members, even if they hadn’t served. 

“But at the end of the day, the national security community and the emergency first-responders community deserve their own organisation.”

Now, with grant support from the Federal government, Fortem (which is Latin for “brave”) will be first piloting the service for the AFP and ABF, and then, when funding permits, will expand its services into emergency and first-responder communities.

“The big focus of Fortem will be social connections and the program will be about connecting people with other people they work with but outside of the work environment,” he says. 

Fortem’s service delivery manager Darrin Lincoln, 53, of Belconnen, says they’ll start off with a number of simple coffee catch-ups and walking groups to begin to connect people in the AFP and ABF.

“It’s about getting people talking about things other than work and understanding that there’s more to life than work,” he says. 

John says Fortem also wants to highlight the work that these men and women do because he doesn’t think the community recognises them enough. 

“We often take what these individuals do for granted,” he says. 

“We really want people to respect that when they call triple zero and get a person at the other end of the line, these are the people who carry what they see with them. 

“One of my personal desires is to have people respect first responders in the same way they do veterans.

“We take them for granted as a community and we need to shine a light on them because they’re always there.”

Fortem’s not the only organisation shining a light on the mental health of AFP, ABF and Australia’s first-responders community, with Beyond Blue publishing the first national study on the mental health and wellbeing of police and emergency services staff last year, and the Federal government following with an inquiry into the mental health of first responders this year. 

Of the 21,014 people who took part in the Beyond Blue study, “Answering the Call”, more than half of all employees indicated that they had experienced a traumatic event that deeply affected them during the course of their work, 61 per cent said they avoided telling people about their mental health condition and more than one in 2.5 employees and one in three volunteers report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition in their life compared to one in five of all adults in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2015).

“When you do experience trauma, one of the best things to have is a social network, not Facebook!” John says. 

If people don’t have this network, John says they’re more likely to experience PTSD or marriage breakdowns. 

Through Fortem, John says they recognised that the best impact they could have on these communities is through social engagement. 

“No one’s tried to link all the organisations with each other and with the community,” he says.

“It’s unique and that uniqueness needs to be tested. 

“In order to do this properly, we need to set the pilot up, which we’ve been doing for several months, identify and measure the outcome, and then state-by-state, deliver it to first responders and national security workers because they’re in every town and suburb we have in Australia.”

Fortem has set up an advisory board with senior members from all of the organisations to help Fortem define the exact needs of all the organisations. 

“One of the main things we want to do is be a conduit between the organisations,” he says. 

fortemaustralia.org.au