CypherCon 2023
Taking Care of You; Dealing with the cumulative stress, burnout, and depression and the challenge of dealing with complicated grief and loss due to death of someone in your community.
Greg Young
Abstract:
The work you do is challenging, requiring you to be vigilant to deal with the constant threat of cyberattacks. Having to deal with the demands of the ever evolving technology, staying one step ahead of the attackers, the increasingly heavy workload and long hours, and the isolation causes a great deal of stress which can lead to burnout, depression, and even suicide. The work you do often requires intense focus, causing your mind to get stuck in the “on” position, making it hard to turn it off, hard to relax, resulting in burnout.
This presentation covers the impact of cumulative stress, the signs of burnout, and the acute stress caused when dealing with the complicated grief and loss of someone in your community.
The presentation will end with some practical ways to mitigate the stress in your life.
Greg Young
chaplain, trainer & debriefer
Greg Young is the chaplain, trainer & debriefer for the Germantown, Police Department, and a retired chaplain with the FBI. Greg is a Resilience/Post-traumatic growth trainer as well as a trainer in Cumulative Stress and Moral Injury.
In August of 2022, Greg led a team of 3 professionals into Ukraine. While there Greg presented on moral trauma, complicated grief and loss in war, and How to Make death notifications, for officers and city officials in Rivne, Ukraine; helped with a chaplain graduation in Kiev, presented on moral trauma at the Dniproprotvsk University of Internal Affairs in Dnipro, as well as at a Police retreat center in Lubney, Ukraine. In November 2019, Greg led a team of 4 police officers from the Midwest to Ukraine to introduce regional police departments to Peer Support and Chaplaincy Programs. Upon arrival, Greg and 3 of the officers met with the Ukraine Minister of Internal Affairs who made the decision following that meeting to open up the entire country to these kinds of programs and ordered a police escort for our team as we traveled, meeting with police officers and speaking at Police Universities
He presented at the “Symposium for Hope, Resilience, and Recovery, following the Sandy Hook Tragedy” at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, Connecticut and co-led a followup debriefing for the first responders to Sandy Hook. Greg also responded to the Sikh Temple Mass shooting in Oak Creek, Wisconsin as well the Azana Spa mass shooting, and most recently was called in to assist the workers and executives following the Molson Coors Mass shooting in Milwaukee. More recently, Greg was called down to Kenosha following the shootings and rioting to provide one-on-one psychological support and a debriefing for Kenosha County Human Services staff. Over the years Greg has provided many debriefings following officer involved shootings, line-of-duty deaths and officer suicides and many other critical incidents.
Since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, Greg has been called in to provide debriefing support and resilience and stress training for many Public Health Departments.
Greg is adjunct faculty at Fox Valley Technical College’s Public Safety Training Center, and a trainer for the University of Wisconsin, Behavioral Health Training Partnership, and a long-time trainer for the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation. Greg has a B.A. in Sociology and M.Divinity degree; he also completed a two year post-graduate clinical program at the Center for Religion and Psychotherapy of Chicago.
Greg written articles on the following: “Bearing Bad News” for “Police” magazine, September, 2010; “Talking to People in Crisis”, “Law and Order” magazine, April, 2014: “Reconnecting Officers to their Purpose, their “Why”, Michigan Chiefs of Police magazine, Winter, 2021; “The Incidents you Respond to that Breaks your Heart”