Mike McGrew estimates his family has more than 320 years of combined experience in police and firefighting.
His father was the chief of the Santa Barbara Fire Department. His grandfather was on the LA City Fire Department. He was a police officer for 31 years.
“I've got a long line going back three generations,” said the retired homicide and major crimes detective.
But those centuries of public service have left deep scars, some of which will never heal. So McGrew knows from experience that many of the thousands of first responders are working Wildfires in Southern California They will eventually go home, weighed down by memories of the death and destruction they have witnessed over the past two weeks.
“It hits you personally,” he said.
“They're good at fighting. They do what they have to do, they're first responders. But fight after fight comes. How do you deal with those things?”
To help in that fight, McGrew co-founded 911 at Ease International, a Santa Barbara-based charity that provides free trauma-informed counseling to police and firefighters. The group is one of several formed over the past decade to address mental health issues among first responders, who have higher rates of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide than the general population.

A Kern County fire chief directs his crew as they battle the intensive Altadena Apartments Jan. 8.
(Gina Ferrazzi/Los Angeles Times)
“Firefighters are exposed to the ultimate worst situations. It does something to somebody,” said Hugo Catalan Jr., director of behavioral health services for the United Firefighters of the City of Los Angeles. “I always tell a firefighter you don't have PTSD, but you have some symptoms of a post-traumatic event May be.
“The things you see every day change you. The level of trauma you're exposed to is something most people will never see.
Most people will experience half a dozen traumatic fight-or-flight episodes in their lives, while a police officer or firefighter will typically experience 200 or more, McGrew said. Yet over the years first responders have leaned into the macho stereotypes surrounding their jobs and refused to acknowledge the mental toll those jobs take.
“There's a stigma. They said it's a tough job, so go out and soak it up,” said McGrew, who said she was suicidal from the stress of her job. “The trauma starts to affect you. Your life starts to fall apart.
“Policemen and firefighters actually have a higher divorce rate and negative coping mechanisms like alcohol.”
However, as the cost of those coping mechanisms became known and access to mental health support became more widespread, the “rub some dirt on it” attitude has faded over the past 10 years.
“It started with the incoming generation,” Catalan said. “Mental health is a very available and talked-about resource throughout their lives. They're exposed to therapy all the way through elementary school, middle school, high school, and college.
“So we're seeing more members coming to us at an earlier age, as opposed to members closer to retirement, who are all coming to us when they're already in decline.”

A firefighter returns to a camp set up in the Rose Bowl parking lot.
(Alan J. Shaben/Los Angeles Times)
However, getting firefighters to talk isn't easy, especially if they don't admit they're struggling in the first place. For Tim Sell, Pasadena's deputy fire chief, it's become a bit like the motto, “If you see something, say something.”

Pasadena Deputy Fire Chief Tim Sell at a daily briefing for firefighters stationed at the Rose Bowl.
(Alan J. Shaben/Los Angeles Times)
“It makes big fire departments better,” he said. “We live for each other, don't we? We really try to be a family at the station, so when someone is out or someone is struggling, we're getting better and better at noticing those signs and being proactive on the outside.
“Is that a problem? Absolutely. We have seen. It doesn't take a cataclysm to build and affect people.
“It's always been culturally driven, and we can't break that shield,” said Scott Ross, a retired L.A. County fire captain who now works as a peer counselor. “It took a long time for the support of colleagues in the fire service to be a trusted institution; a place of confidentiality and where they knew they could talk to someone who had been through something.
“But we're not 100% close to where this is an accepted thing.”
Ellen Bradley-Windell, co-founder and medical director of the Valencia Relationship Institute in Santa Clarita, is the mother of an LA County fire chief on the front lines of the Palisades fire. He's been working with first responders for years, and says many of the problems they face are the result of “cumulative trauma,” meaning it builds up over years, smoldering like smoldering embers in a wildfire before igniting.
“Something happens and then they explode,” he said. “Battalion leaders come into my office in full uniform, and then they break down.”
That's why he agrees with McGrew and others who say the true impact of the Southern California wildfires won't be known for years.
“We deal with fires while we are busy putting them out. But when things end, we start to think about what we saw and what we did,” said Capt. Robert Velasquez of Cal Fire. “Things get worse or we do things that harm us.”

Richard Alamo of Sacramento walks his K-9 service dog, Ember, with firefighters and first responders battling the Eaton Fire in the Rose Bowl parking lot.
(Alan J. Shaben/Los Angeles Times)
This weekend, Velasquez helped staff the peer-counseling center at the Rose Bowl, the base camp for the nearly 4,000 first responders working on the Eaton fire. There are doctors, chaplains and eight therapy dogs available 24 hours a day. And they have been busy.
“Dogs are very popular,” Velasquez said as Ember, a happy yellow Labrador, rested in the sun at her feet.
But dogs are also important because they make people open up.
“We couldn't make all the connections we do without dogs,” Velasquez said.
Peer counseling typically offered to first responders is different from traditional counseling or therapy. In peer counseling, police officers and firefighters with similar experiences meet in a group setting or one-on-one to support each other. Dr. Steve Froehlich, director of behavioral health services for the LA County Fire Department, said that approach is key.
“There's a level we can't understand because the most well-intentioned doctors aren't doing the work,” he said. “I wouldn't even be having this conversation without a beer on the phone.”
A first responder's family is often part of that equation, as family members also suffer from the effects of the job. As a boy, McGrew remembers being shocked by a news report that some firefighters he knew his father were fighting had died in a fire.
“I'm pretty sure my dad was one of those firefighters,” he said. “I remember crying when he walked in the door because he was alive.”
Fast forward two decades and McGrew was working another wildfire when his wife said she was ordered to evacuate.
“I'm sorry I can't be there,” he told her. “I'm busy helping these people. These first responders, they're willing to sacrifice their lives to save someone else's life. But it's a little more personal when you know you're not just hurting yourself, you're hurting your family.
It's happening every day at the Eaton fire, where firefighters are forced to evacuate their friends and family. Sell said at least two firefighters remained on the job after losing their homes.
“Marriage has a lot of problems; Children are affected,” Bradley-Windell said. “Then, when guys come home, the dynamic changes, especially when they've been gone a long time.
“Families have a lot of stress, so we work with them on anger management.
For others, that anger continues to burn even after the wildfire is extinguished.