Retirement means you take off many parts of your Protective Armour:  your uniform, professional role, sense of identity and purpose, fitness regime and camaraderie of colleagues. It can be a stressful time, even if you’ve completed your 30 years and are optimistic for the future, so it’s important you look after your physical and mental health.  

Some of you will find other ways to contribute to your community through working in other public service roles or volunteering. Others will set yourselves challenges to help you maintain your physical (and therefore mental) fitness. You can think of these are your new armour.  

As you remove your protective armour, watch out for unfinished trauma business. It is inevitable there will be some jobs that have stayed with you through your service. These may be incidents that you can talk about and remember with sadness, but there may also be jobs that haunt you and which you’ve avoided thinking about for years. If there are, then retirement is when your brain will try to process them. You’ll be dealing with old injuries without your protective armour and that can be hard.

If this is happening, please have a look at the explanation and advice on What can I do if I'm not OK? part of the site to understand what is happening and what you can do to help yourself.  

If you need help, please contact the Rivers Centre (details on our welcome page), your GP or the Fire Fighters Charity for support.

Emergency responders are at risk of psychological injury, it’s an occupational hazard. We have treatments that work and psychological injuries heal, but sometimes our recovery depends on us having no more exposure to hazardous situations.  

The process of ill health retirement with a psychological injury can be stressful. Even if you’re well supported by colleagues and management there can be feelings of failure mixed in with the loss and perhaps relief. But if you don’t feel well-supported, then this process can be extremely difficult. A sense of being let down or betrayed by the organisation (see Moral Injury) is likely to make your injury worse and often leads to feelings of anger, shame, and despair. You may question the time you gave to the service or withdraw from colleagues to build your life away from it; further dismantling your protective armour when you’re already unwell.

It is important you have support through this process, from the clinicians treating your injury and from staff bodies. If possible, try to mark the end of your service. It’s not your fault that you got injured; there should be no shame attached to ill health retirement through psychological injury.

Watch this film from retired LSO Paul Devlin on his experience of mental ill health and the importance of reaching out for help.  

Rituals help us cope with change and loss, so retirement events, including pre-retirement courses and the ritual presentation of a mounted axe with a tally of your service dates, are an important way of marking the transition to life outside the service. We need to make sure these rituals happen for those retiring  through ill health as well as those completing their 30 years.

Make use of the information and advice in the Coping and self-care section of this site to help you through this time of change.

You can access support through the services listed on our welcome page, and in particular from SFRS Family Support Trust, Fire Fighters Charity, Fire Brigades Union and National Association of Retired Fire Fighters