When you’ve seen too much

CORALVILLE — In March 2002, Al Fear, then a Cedar Rapids police officer, was called to the Indian Creek Nature Center where two boys had been hit by a freight train on a railroad bridge behind the center.

He remembers giving CPR to a 6-year-old boy whose parents were standing above him, begging Fear to save the life of their child who was already dead.

It is one of the more traumatic memories Fear has from his 25-plus years as a Cedar Rapids police officer. Now retired, he said he wishes he’d had better tools at the time for dealing with trauma and mental health concerns.

“If you don’t acknowledge that something’s affected you, it’s going to change you as a person,” he said. “And then you become a very cynical, very angry and bitter person where you start to hate your job.

“There was a point in my career where every time I pulled into the parking lot of the police department, I could feel heartburn, like my blood pressure would start rising.”

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After he retired, he and two friends, who’d also retired from law enforcement, talked about the unresolved trauma that can accompany such jobs.

They then started the yearslong effort to create The Guardian Training Institute, a nonprofit that provides free or low-cost programs to firefighters, police officers and other first responders to improve their mental health.

It is now offering that mental health training to employees at private businesses, at the request of those businesses.

‘Taking care of ourselves’

In creating the Iowa City-based nonprofit, Fear teamed up with Pete Ungaro and Bill Searls.

“We just came to the realization that we, in law enforcement and first response, we do a really good job of taking care of the community and taking care of others, but we don’t do a real good job of taking care of ourselves,“ Fear said.

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Ungaro, who worked for almost 18 years with the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and is now working on getting a Ph.D. in psychology, took on the role of program director.

Searls — who worked for the Coralville Police Department, the Iowa Department of Corrections and the University of Iowa Department of Public Safety — and Fear are associate program directors.

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And Dawn Rechkemmer, a licensed therapist who previously worked as an EMS paramedic for more than 20 years, joined the team as the mental health and wellness coordinator.

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Discussions about creating the institute started about seven years ago, but it took a while to get things going, Ungaro said.

The original plan was to create a for-profit business, but the founders quickly discovered that many public safety departments don’t have the funding to pay for extra training. The Guardian Training Institute became a nonprofit in June 2022.

“There have been a lot of times where my partners and I, because we couldn’t get any business going — everybody wanted our training, but nobody had the money for it — there were many discussions of ‘maybe we should just throw in the towel and forget this idea. It’s just not going to work.’ But we all decided it’s just too important,” Ungaro said.

What’s offered

The institute offers sessions on topics like resiliency, identifying when a co-worker needs support, mediation, crisis intervention and de-escalation.

They also help departments develop an employee wellness program.

And they offer critical incident support services, where they debrief and process emotions with first responders, in groups and individually, after an especially traumatic incident.

The institute also has a therapy dog, a dalmatian named Athena, that Ungaro adopted from the Iowa City Animal Shelter after the animal had been abused. Athena now helps with critical incident support and with other programs.

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“We have to normalize mental health and break down the stigma and break down the barriers to actually acknowledge the fact that something traumatic has happened and that you are affected by it,” Fear said. “And that it's not a weakness to admit that you actually have feelings about something. That's the first step.”

The training and programs for first responders are funded with government grants and donations, which can be given through the nonprofit’s website, guardiantraininginstitute.org.

Ungaro said the founders have funded services out of their own pocket in some instances when the need is great.

Business training

Though most of the nonprofit’s work is in the public sector, The Guardian Institute has begun offering programs at businesses, at the request of businesses who seek mental health training for their employees.

“As I’ve started to find out, a lot of these private corporations have the same problems that emergency services are having,” Ungaro said. “They don't have any retention. They're losing their people all the time. They're having turnover. They're having burnout.

“So, we started to open up a lot of our services now to private organizations and corporations as well.”

When the institute works with private businesses, they either charge full price or work out a training program in exchange for a donation to the nonprofit.

Ungaro said the training is kept as inexpensive as possible, with the average cost for a one-day training session about $125 per person for a business, he said.

“Looking at some of the other training stuff for private entities, … we’re way underpriced, but that’s our goal: to stay there so we can reach as many people as we can,” Ungaro said.

Ungaro said mental health issues with first responders tend to be trauma-based and that mental health issues with private companies are varied and can be more situational.

But in both cases, he said, it’s important to make sure people feel comfortable reaching out for help.

“We try and reduce the stigma of mental health,” he said. “We make it more OK to go reach out to a therapist. We make it OK to say, ‘I’m struggling today. I need some help.’

“Because I think we all struggle in silence and then nobody gets any help.”

Comments: (319) 398-8328; emily.andersen@thegazette.com