The following article was submitted for the 2025 Fire Service Thought Leadership Essay Contest, focused on understanding the “why” behind mental health challenges in the fire service. This article received an honorable mention in the contest, which is managed by Darley, in partnership with the National Fallen Firefighters Foundation (NFFF).
Read past essays and learn how to submit your own essay.
By Shawn McKerry
The ash was still warm beneath my boots. A line of scorched pine trees stood like silent sentinels, blackened skeletons reaching into a grey sky. We had done everything we could — worked for days without sleep, thrown everything at the fire that logistics and physics allowed. And still, the fire won. Homes were lost. Livelihoods erased. Families displaced.
No one blamed us. Not officially. But that didn’t matter. Firefighters don’t need to be blamed to feel like they’ve failed. It’s baked into the job — into the culture. When we don’t stop the fire, we don’t just report the loss. We carry it. Quietly. Permanently.
Everyone knows the fire service is dangerous. What they don’t talk about is what happens after the smoke clears — when the body walks away but the mind stays behind. They don’t see the guilt, the questions, the weight we carry for things no one could have controlled. They don’t talk about cancer either — not just the kind that eats your body from the inside out, but the one that gnaws at your certainty, your future, your family.
We’re told it’s just part of the job. We accept that. But pretending the mental toll we face is no different than other first responders misses the truth — and worse, risks leaving our people behind.
Yes, we are first responders. But firefighting brings with it a culture, an identity, and a set of long-term threats that make our mental health burden uniquely severe. This isn’t about comparing trauma like scorecards — it’s about finally understanding why the fire service needs its own mental health strategy, and what makes our experience different.
1. Fire doesn’t forgive: living with the uncontainable
There’s a truth about fire that every firefighter learns early: you don’t beat it — you manage it. You contain it. You buy time. You give people a chance to get out, to start over. But you never really win.
We say that out loud, in training, in planning meetings, over morning coffee. But when the fire escapes the lines — when it levels homes, or races down a hillside faster than we can move a pump — it doesn’t feel like a tactical inevitability. It feels like personal failure.
In 2024, when the Jasper Complex Wildfire tore across Alberta, I watched seasoned crews come home from that deployment looking shattered. Not because they didn’t do their job — but because they did everything right, and it still wasn’t enough. The same feeling echoed in Lahaina, Hawaii in 2023, where hurricane winds turned a wildfire into a flash firestorm that erased entire communities in hours. And just recently, in Los Angeles in 2025, where relentless heat, drought, and wind overwhelmed even the best-coordinated urban fire response, firefighters were left with block after block of devastation they couldn’t stop.
These aren’t isolated events. They’re becoming the new normal. And each time, the burden on firefighters grows — not just physically, but emotionally.
You might stand in front of a news camera and say the right things, but inside, you’re replaying every decision, every delay, every moment you think might’ve changed the outcome.
No other service asks its members to stand in the ruins and wonder if they failed their community. Not like this.
2. The cancer clock: a silent threat that never leaves
We’ve all heard it: “Fire doesn’t just kill in the moment — it kills in the years that follow.” Every time we pull hose into a burning structure or overhaul through chemical-laced debris, we know we’re inhaling more than smoke — we’re inhaling our future.
Cancer isn’t a possibility anymore. It’s an expectation.
But lately, it’s not just the fireground that haunts us — it’s the very gear we wear to protect us. For decades, firefighters have been unknowingly surrounded by PFAS and PFOA chemicals — the so-called forever chemicals embedded in turnout gear. These are compounds that don’t break down, that build up in the body over time and have been strongly linked to cancer.
So now we face a cruel irony: the same gear we rely on to survive every shift may be slowly killing us.
This realization has shattered trust. It’s made veterans angry and rookies anxious. It’s made us question whether the systems meant to protect us are willing to speak the truth — or if they’d rather bury it under bureaucracy and liability.
We prepare for the fireground, we train for the mayday, but nothing in our manuals tells us how to handle watching your brothers and sisters fade away from something you all breathed in together.
No other emergency service faces this scale of environmental threat baked into the job. And that makes the fire service different — not just in how we die, but in how we live with the fear of dying before our time.
3. The cost of the cape: how the ‘hero’ ideal hurts
Most people love firefighters. We’re trusted, respected, and celebrated. That praise might sound harmless. But for the people wearing the gear, it becomes a heavy mask to wear.
Being seen as a hero doesn’t just feel good — it creates expectation. We’re supposed to be strong. We’re supposed to handle anything. We’re supposed to see horrible things and walk it off. And over time, we learn to perform that version of ourselves — even when it’s breaking us.
Travis Howze, a former firefighter and police officer, put it best: “If I came in with a broken leg, you’d carry me. If I said I wasn’t okay in my head, you’d look away.”
That quote stopped me cold. Because it’s true.
Until we stop glorifying invincibility and start embracing humanity, we will keep losing good people — not in the fire, but in the silence that follows.
4. The house built on silence: brotherhood, loyalty and suppression
The firehouse is sacred. But it’s also where some of the most dangerous silences live.
That silence doesn’t come from apathy — it comes from loyalty. We don’t want to burden the crew. We don’t want to throw off the mood. So even when the trauma starts catching up to us, we laugh it off. We bottle it up.
You could be sitting across from someone who saved a child last week and had a nightmare about it last night — and you’d never know.
We’re not just fighting fires — we’re fighting the fear of being seen as a liability to the crew we love.
If the firehouse is our sanctuary, it also needs to be our safe space for honesty. Until we break the silence inside the house, we’ll keep losing people outside of it.
5. Rewriting the narrative: what needs to shift
It starts by redefining strength. We need to teach our recruits from day one that asking for help isn’t weakness — it’s survival.
But it can’t stop there.
- Mental health supports must be embedded, not optional.
- National-level investment in research is critical. The U.S. has made some progress on PFAS and toxic exposure. Canada is still far behind.
- More cancers must be added to presumptive legislation.
- Support must extend to families.
- And leaders must live the culture they promote.
This is a turning point for the fire service. The fire will always be dangerous. But the aftermath doesn’t have to be.
Owning the uniqueness
We lose firefighters to fire. We lose them to cancer. And more and more, we lose them to silence.
That’s what makes firefighting more than just another emergency service. It’s what makes our mental health burden uniquely heavy.
This isn’t about comparing wounds. It’s about understanding what survival in this profession actually looks like.
Because if we’re going to keep calling each other heroes, then we’d better start taking care of each other like we mean it.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shawn McKerry is dean of the Emergency Training Centre in Lakeland College, Alberta.