The importance of personality in the development of PTSD in firefighters
Fire fighters routinely risk their lives to protect the public. Over 1 million fire fighters in the United States alone sign up for this dangerous profession to protect people, wildlands, and property despite known threats to their healthy, safety, and wellbeing. While our prior research points to remarkable levels of resilience in this population given their enormous exposure to a variety of traumatic experiences (Gulliver et al., in press), a minority of fire fighters do develop posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or related mental health problems. This points toward the presence of individual-level risk factors that drives this variability in responses to traumatic events.