There's a question this episode's guest says he asks every time he gives a talk to police officers in Brazil: "raise your hand if you've ever felt this." He then runs through a list of symptoms — constant irritability, poor sleep, emotional numbness, the feeling of always being "switched on" even off duty — and, he says, most hands go up. The guest is today a federal agent in the United States, but he began his career as a state trooper in Texas. In this episode, he talks with Eliel Teixeira and Edwin Wu, the show's two hosts, both Brazilian-born police officers who are now American citizens with long careers in the Los Angeles, California area, about a topic that rarely gets the weight it deserves in police training: what repeated exposure to traumatic events does to the body and mind of someone who works in uniform — and why, in both the United States and Brazil, that conversation still stumbles over the same taboo, just with different accents.

From "shell shock" to PTSD: a hundred years trying to name the same problem

One of the points raised in the conversation is historical, and it helps explain why the mental health of frontline workers — whether in military combat or in policing — took so long to be treated as a serious medical issue. The psychological reaction to extremely stressful and violent events has a long history of different names, and each name carries the understanding — or the prejudice — of its era.

In World War I, soldiers who came back from the front with tremors, partial amnesia, recurring nightmares and an inability to function were diagnosed with "shell shock" — a term that at the time assumed a physical, almost mechanical cause, tied to the concussion of nearby explosions. It was only later that people realized many of these soldiers had never even been close to an explosion: the problem wasn't the impact of a bomb on the skull, it was the accumulation of terror, loss and emotional exhaustion. In World War II, the label changed to "combat fatigue" or "battle fatigue," a name that already better recognized the psychological nature of the condition, but still treated it as something temporary — almost a kind of tiredness that would pass with rest.

Formal clinical recognition only came after the Vietnam War, when post-traumatic stress disorder — PTSD — officially entered the American psychiatric diagnostic manual (the DSM-III) in 1980. It was the first time medicine recognized, with defined clinical criteria, that exposure to traumatic events could produce a lasting, treatable disorder — not a sign of weak character. More recently, within the U.S. armed forces themselves, the term "warrior syndrome" has also gained traction (sometimes used alongside discussions of traumatic brain injury), in an attempt to capture the cumulative effect of years of operational exposure — not a single event, but hundreds of them, stacked one on top of another.

This real, documented timeline — shell shock, combat fatigue, PTSD, and the more recent discussions about cumulative trauma — matters for understanding policing because the logic is the same, just without a war uniform and without the institutional recognition that decades of pressure won for veterans. A police officer doesn't live through a declared war, but over twenty, twenty-five years of a career, they can live through a sequence of individually traumatic events that, added together, produce the same kind of wear and tear it took medicine a century to properly name.

The stroke that slipped past two exams

The guest's personal account in this episode directly illustrates the cost of a system that isn't prepared to recognize this wear and tear in time. He says that in 2016, while still a state trooper, he had an episode at work that is now known to have been a stroke. At the time, however, the department doctor measured his blood pressure, concluded it wasn't a stroke, and didn't order an MRI — even though half his body showed momentary paralysis. The diagnosis that ended up on record was something else: a cervical spine problem, with compressed vertebrae, which led to neck fusion surgery.

It's important to be precise here: this is a personal account, told on a podcast, and it doesn't replace a medical report — nothing in the episode, and nothing in this article, should be read as clinical guidance on how to interpret neurological symptoms. What the guest describes is his own trajectory: the spine problem was real and was treated, but it wasn't the full explanation for what had happened that day.

Almost eight years later, already experiencing loss of sensation and balance problems, he sought care again. This time, a spine surgeon — no longer a department occupational physician — ordered a brain MRI. The scan showed a white spot, a characteristic sign of an old stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA), never diagnosed at the time it happened. From there he was referred to a neurologist and to a hospital specialized in treating police officers and military personnel, where he underwent an evaluation focused specifically on trauma and PTSD. The result, as he tells it in the episode, pointed to "severe trauma."

The sequence of the two exams — the blood pressure check in 2016 and the MRI almost eight years later — isn't told in the episode as an accusation against any specific professional, but as an example of how the healthcare structure for frontline workers can fail to catch signs that, in hindsight, look more serious than they were treated as at the time.

An ordinary person, four to eight traumatic events. A police officer, hundreds

One of the numbers that comes up in the conversation helps put the problem in scale. According to the guest, a person outside the policing profession experiences, on average, somewhere between four and eight truly traumatic events over an entire lifetime — a serious accident, the death of someone close, a robbery. An American police officer, in the field estimate he brings from his own experience, can live through somewhere around 800 "critical incidents" over a career. It's worth noting this number is a field estimate from the guest himself, not data from a specific study cited by name in the episode — and he himself notes that the average varies a lot depending on the size and location of the department: small departments, with a low volume of serious incidents, pull the national average down, while officers in large urban centers like Los Angeles, New York and Miami accumulate exposure well above that average over the course of a career.

This kind of field account, it's worth saying, isn't isolated from what academic research on policing has been describing for years. There's an established body of literature, produced by universities and public safety institutes in the United States, showing that police officers report significantly higher rates of post-traumatic stress symptoms than the general population — and that the central explanation usually isn't a single catastrophic event, but exactly this cumulative, repeated exposure to "critical incidents": shootings, deaths, serious accidents, domestic violence, child abuse, notifying families of a death. It's this accumulation — not necessarily a single isolated episode — that research points to as the central risk factor for developing trauma-related disorders over a policing career.

In the episode, the guest is direct about which type of incident affected him most over his career: cases involving children. He mentions, as one of the first significant incidents of his career, a case of sexual abuse against a nine-month-old baby — a heavy account, which he brings not as a morbid detail, but as an example of the kind of emotional weight an officer carries and, in his view, rarely has a structured space to process.

Dark humor, alcohol, and the habit of "boxing it up"

One point Eliel Teixeira and Edwin Wu discuss with the guest throughout the conversation is how internal police culture — not only in the United States, but in similar ways in other agencies around the world — tends to deal with this accumulation of trauma through repression rather than processing. Instead of treating each serious event as something that needs to be psychologically worked through, the culture tends to "box it up": move on to the next call, the next shift, without stopping to process what was just experienced.

Dark humor comes up in the conversation as a widely recognized coping mechanism among police officers, firefighters and paramedics: a way of creating emotional distance from extreme scenes through jokes that, outside the context of the profession, would sound disturbing. It's a real mechanism, documented in studies on high-stress professions, but it has a limit — it helps get through the moment, it doesn't replace long-term processing of accumulated trauma.

It's at this point that the conversation reaches another, less harmless coping mechanism: alcohol use. According to what's discussed in the episode, when a department's culture treats psychological suffering as something that shouldn't be voiced — or worse, as a risk to be managed from the agency's legal standpoint rather than something to be genuinely cared for — the long-term effect pushes many officers toward forms of self-medication, with alcohol being the most common. This reality — that problematic alcohol use is more common among police officers than in the general population, and that it's frequently linked to untreated occupational trauma — is also a topic treated with growing seriousness by American public safety organizations in recent years.

When talking about mental health turns into "liability risk"

One of the most direct points in the conversation is the gap between institutional discourse and actual practice inside American departments. The hosts and the guest discuss how, today, it's common for an American police department to have, on paper, psychological support programs, resilience training, support hotlines — what the episode describes, in the informal words of those in the conversation, as "nice-looking," but something that in practice doesn't always translate into a real shift in internal culture.

The explanation that comes up in the episode is that, in many cases, this type of program is born less from genuine concern for officer well-being and more as a way for the department to protect itself from liability — that is, to have something documented to show if an officer gets sick, takes leave or, in the worst-case scenario, takes their own life. This tension between "having the program on paper" and "actually changing the culture" isn't exclusive to American policing, but it helps explain why, even in departments with resources and formal psychological support structures, the internal stigma of asking for help remains high.

This is also why police suicide has become, in the United States, a publicly recognized issue for federal agencies and public safety institutes in recent years — not as an isolated problem in this or that department, but as an indicator that cumulative exposure to trauma, combined with the culture of silence around it, carries a real, measurable cost on the lives of those who serve. It's this backdrop that gives weight to the guest's account: his undiagnosed stroke and his later "severe trauma" evaluation aren't an isolated, rare case — they're a relatively common portrait of a profession that lives with extreme exposure and, historically, with little formal structure to process it.

California, Texas, and why the rules change state by state

It's worth noting, for anyone reading this article outside the world of policing, that Eliel Teixeira and Edwin Wu work — and built the careers that give this show its authority — in the Los Angeles, California area. The guest, for his part, came from a different path: he began as a state trooper in Texas before moving into a federal career. That matters because the structure of psychological support, mental-health leave benefits, and even how each department handles diagnoses like his vary from state to state within the United States itself — what applies to a department in California isn't necessarily the rule at a department in Texas, and vice versa. The episode's account, then, should be read as a portrait of the American experience in general, crossing two different states, not as a single, universal rule that applies to any department in the country.

Brazil, seen from the outside

The guest also talks, in the episode, about his experience giving talks on operator syndrome and operational stress in Brazil. According to him, when he lists the symptoms of cumulative trauma exposure for audiences of Brazilian police officers, most raise their hands recognizing themselves in them — a sign, in his reading, that the problem is just as present in Brazil as it is in the United States, only even more silenced. He points out that Brazilian police officers face extremely violent incidents — exchanges of gunfire far more frequently than most American departments — without, in his assessment, having the psychological support structure that matches that level of exposure. It's a point raised in the episode as recognition and appreciation for the work of these professionals, not as a hierarchical comparison between countries — every police system carries its own reality of risk, resources and internal culture, and Brazil and the United States operate under very different legal, training and support structures.

Sources and verification

This article is based on the guest's account and on the comments from Eliel Teixeira and Edwin Wu during the Palavrão Tático episode linked on this page. The personal account of the 2016 health episode, the later diagnosis and the trauma evaluation is told by the guest himself on the show and reproduced here as a personal account — not as a medical diagnosis verified by this newsroom, and it should not be read as clinical guidance. The estimate of roughly 800 critical incidents over an American policing career is presented in the episode as the guest's own field figure, not as the result of a specific study named in the conversation. The historical context on the evolution of clinical terminology for combat trauma — from "shell shock" in World War I to "combat/battle fatigue" in World War II and the formal inclusion of PTSD in the DSM-III in 1980 — matches the documented history of American psychiatry on the subject. The existence of higher rates of post-traumatic stress symptoms among police officers compared to the general population, and the growing recognition of police suicide as a public health issue in the United States, correspond to topics widely documented by academic research and American public safety institutes, cited here in a general and responsible manner.

Who's speaking here: Eliel Teixeira and Edwin Wu are Brazilian-born police officers, now American citizens, with long careers in the Los Angeles, California area. In this episode, they talk with a guest who is today a federal agent in the United States and who began his career as a state trooper in Texas.

The information about police structure, benefits and internal culture described in this article reflects the American experience in general, drawn from two different states (California and Texas) — specific rules vary from department to department and from state to state.