Mental Health of Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cadets Completing Training

Serving Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) evidence prevalent mental health disorders, likely due to diverse occupational stressors including potentially psychologically traumatic events. RCMP cadet mental health when starting the Cadet Training Program (CTP) appears comparable to, or better, than the general public. The CTP is expected to improve mental health, but the mental health of cadets who complete the CTP immediately prior to active-duty deployment remained unknown. The current paper provides estimates of RCMP cadet mental health at pre-deployment. Participants were RCMP cadets who completed a survey assessing self-reported mental health disorder symptoms (n = 449, 73.9% male) and the Mini International Neuropsychiatric Interview (M.I.N.I.; n = 466, 75.8% male) at pre-deployment as part of a larger RCMP study. Participant mental health at pre-training was compared between cadets who did (completers) and did not (non-completers) complete the pre-deployment assessments. At pre-deployment, the proportion of completers who screened positive for one or more current mental disorders based on self-reported symptoms (7.3%) or the M.I.N.I. (4.1%) was lower than the diagnostic prevalence for the general population (10.1%), with no statistically significant sex or gender differences. Completers evidenced improved mental health relative to their pre-training assessments, better mental health at pre-training than non-completers, and better mental health than serving RCMP. The current results are the first to describe RCMP cadet mental health at pre-deployment. The results indicate that RCMP deployed from the CTP have excellent mental health, suggesting that protecting RCMP mental health requires ongoing efforts to address the impacts of postdeployment occupational stressors.