By Paul Milne

Content warning: This article discusses suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and occupational psychological injury. Support information is provided at the end.

In November 2022, I wrote an opinion piece asking what I believed was an uncomfortable but necessary question: What value is Northern Territory Police putting on life?

At the time, I questioned how many more police officers we might lose to mental ill-health, psychological injury or suicide before fundamental changes were made to the way the organisation protected its people.

I wrote that article as a former NT Police sergeant who had experienced the consequences of occupational psychological injury personally. I joined NT Police in 2004 and served in frontline, supervisory and remote policing roles before being medically retired in 2017 following a post traumatic stress disorder diagnosis.

My family and I subsequently moved to Victoria, where I was able to access specialist mental health treatment. But the article was never intended to be simply an account of my own experience.

In 2022, I remained in contact with serving and former police officers, and the stories I was hearing suggested that many of the problems I had encountered were not confined to the past.

Officers spoke about inadequate follow-up after traumatic incidents, difficulties navigating return-to-work processes, inconsistent communication, stigma surrounding psychological injury, concerns about the career consequences of seeking help, insufficient specialist mental health resources and the impact on families when an officer became unwell.

I was particularly concerned about a system that appeared to depend too heavily on psychologically injured members recognising their own deterioration and then voluntarily asking for help.

Four years later, I have returned to the issue. I wish I could conclude that the concerns raised in 2022 now belong to another period in NT policing.

There have undoubtedly been reforms, increased investment and greater organisational attention to mental health and wellbeing. Those developments should be acknowledged. But the evidence that has emerged since 2022 through NT Police’s own Wellbeing Strategy, the 2024 Northern Territory Police Review, an independent review of that wellbeing strategy and, most importantly, the 2026 coronial findings following the death of Senior Constable First Class Michael Deutrom raises a much more difficult question.

The issue is no longer whether NT Police understands that it has a problem. The issue is whether, after years of warnings, reviews, strategies and significant expenditure, it can demonstrate that its members are actually psychologically safer.

READ: Opinion – How many more NT police officers will we lose to mental health or, even worse, suicide?

The warnings were already there

One of the most revealing documents in considering what has changed is the Northern Territory Police, Fire and Emergency Services Wellbeing Strategy 2023–2027. The strategy was presented as a comprehensive framework for reforming support for frontline workers, protecting mental health and embedding wellbeing throughout the organisation.

Its stated ambition was significant: to create a workplace in which people had the support they needed, without stigma, throughout their careers.

Yet within the same strategy was an unusually candid description of the problems confronting the organisation. An earlier independent review had identified poor workplace culture and continuing mental health stigma, limited support for employees preparing to leave the service and after their careers, concerns about trust and confidentiality, inconsistent welfare checks, debriefing and post-critical-incident follow-up, and an existing model that relied on self-referral despite recognition that many members would not directly access those services.

Those findings are important because they demonstrate that these problems cannot reasonably be characterised as having emerged only after subsequent tragedy or coronial scrutiny. The organisation knew that relying on self-referral was problematic. It knew that stigma and trust were barriers. It knew that important follow-up processes were being inconsistently applied. It knew that transition from policing required greater support.

These were also many of the concerns I had publicly raised in 2022.

The scale of psychological injury was equally difficult to ignore. NT Police’s own strategy reported that in the first nine months of 2022, 25 per cent of workers’ compensation claims were for mental stress. At October 31 that year, 113 of 247 open NTPFES workers’ compensation claims, or 45.7 per cent, related to mental stress. Those claims had reportedly cost more than $49 million, averaging approximately $435,000 per person.

Perhaps just as concerning from an organisational-culture perspective, 32 per cent of staff surveyed strongly disagreed that senior leaders considered employee wellbeing important.

These were not obscure warning signs. They were contained in the organisation’s own wellbeing strategy.

The death of Michael Deutrom changed the evidence

The subsequent coronial examination of the death of Michael gives this discussion an importance that extends far beyond organisational policy.

I knew Michael. We worked together, and I understand something of the demands associated with remote policing in the Northern Territory.

For that reason, I approach his death with considerable caution and respect. Suicide is complex, and it would be wrong to suggest that a particular intervention would necessarily have prevented Michael’s death. The Coroner herself was careful about hindsight and recognised the genuine efforts of people who had supported him.

But caution should not prevent us from confronting the systemic lessons arising from his death.

The coronial findings examined a police officer who had served for approximately 23 years, predominantly in frontline policing, and who had experienced cumulative occupational trauma. Indicators subsequently examined included declining energy, dissatisfaction with policing, a desire for reduced workload and an extraordinary 723 hours of accumulated recreational leave.

The Coroner found that NT Police wellbeing systems had not identified Michael’s deteriorating mental health and the warning signs placing him at increased risk before his symptoms became entrenched.

That finding challenges one of the most persistent assumptions surrounding police mental health: that an officer who continues performing effectively must therefore be psychologically well. Police officers become exceptionally skilled at functioning under pressure.
They learn to compartmentalise distress, complete the task in front of them and move to the next job. Professionalism, stoicism and commitment can allow someone to remain outwardly capable long after their internal psychological health has started deteriorating.

This is precisely why self-referral cannot be the foundation of an occupational mental health system. It asks the person who may be psychologically injured to recognise the injury, overcome stigma, disregard possible concerns about career consequences and voluntarily identify themselves to the organisation. By the time some officers are capable of acknowledging that they need help, significant injury may already have occurred.

In 2022, I argued that NT Police needed mechanisms that did not rely upon self-referral. Four years later, that concern is no longer simply an opinion informed by lived experience. It sits within a much larger body of organisational and coronial evidence.

From individual resilience to organisational responsibility

Perhaps the most important development since 2022 is the way we should now understand police mental health itself. For too long, workplace mental health discussions have focused heavily on the individual: resilience, coping strategies, mental health literacy, recognising symptoms and encouraging people to reach out. Each of those things can be valuable. None is sufficient on its own.

Police work inevitably exposes people to death, violence, serious injury, grief and human suffering. Some occupational trauma cannot be eliminated. But there is a fundamental difference between unavoidable operational exposure and organisational conditions that can be controlled. Chronic understaffing, excessive workloads, inadequate recovery, unmanaged fatigue, poor support and poorly controlled remote-work risks are not inevitable consequences of wearing a police uniform. They are workplace hazards.

NT Police’s own Wellbeing Strategy recognised some of this. It identified effective rostering, sufficient resourcing, effective disciplinary processes, specified tenure for high-risk positions and strong leadership as organisational enablers of workforce wellbeing. Significantly, however, those enablers were not directly incorporated within the strategy itself and were instead left to broader organisational strategies.

That distinction matters because psychological injury prevention cannot sit solely within a wellbeing unit. If the conditions creating or exacerbating psychological injury arise from workforce shortages, rostering, fatigue, remote staffing arrangements, management practices or organisational culture, then responsibility extends directly to operational and executive leadership.

A psychologist cannot fix an unsafe roster. Mental health first aid cannot provide adequate staffing at a remote station. Resilience training cannot create recovery time for an exhausted officer. Counselling cannot compensate for organisational systems that repeatedly expose people to foreseeable psychological hazards.

Supporting an injured employee is important. Preventing the organisation from unnecessarily contributing to that injury is more important still.

The culture of ‘making do’

This is where one of the most significant aspects of the coronial findings deserves national attention. The Coroner identified an institutional culture within NT Police of “making do” and found it was a material factor in Michael’s exposure to significant stress and trauma.

The findings also recognised that simply increasing resources within the wellbeing unit would not, by itself, resolve the wider organisational problem.

Anyone who has worked in Territory policing understands the concept. A roster is short, so people cover it. Someone is unavailable, so somebody else stays longer. Backup is limited, so officers manage without it. Leave accumulates because operational demands continue. Members remain available when they should be recovering because communities still require a police response. Individual commitment compensates for organisational limitations.

There is something admirable about that commitment when viewed through the lens of individual service. But when an organisation becomes dependent upon employees repeatedly absorbing staffing and resource deficiencies, “making do” can cease being an example of dedication and become a systemic risk.<

The uncomfortable question for any police organisation is whether the resilience of its workforce is being used to protect employees from adversity or to enable the organisation to continue operating despite conditions that should have been addressed.

Resilience should never become a substitute for adequate resourcing.

Remote policing cannot be treated as ordinary policing

The Northern Territory adds another dimension that cannot be ignored. Remote policing can be enormously rewarding, but the occupational demands can be exceptional. Geographic isolation, limited backup, long-distance driving, prisoner transportation, repeated exposure to trauma, extended on-call periods and small staffing establishments can combine to create circumstances in which an officer technically finishes a shift but never psychologically disengages from work.

The coronial findings concerning Michael’s Kintore posting are therefore particularly important. The posting was found to have been harmful in the context of his deteriorating mental wellbeing. The risks examined included isolation, fatigue, extended on-call availability, limited staffing, one-up duties, long-distance travel and the inability to psychologically switch off.

Yet psychological assessment was not mandatory before Michael transferred to Kintore in 2021. According to the evidence reviewed in 2026, mandatory psychological assessment before long-term remote postings still had not clearly been established when the Coroner delivered her findings. A proposal concerning psychometric assessment for certain high-risk roles had been submitted to the NT Police executive in November 2024, but its approval and application to remote postings remained unclear.

This is difficult to reconcile with the organisation’s own strategy. The 2023–2027 Wellbeing Strategy explicitly contemplated psychometric assessment for roles carrying increased psychological-injury risk and stated that well being should be offered at least annually to people in high-risk positions.

If remote policing presents a foreseeable combination of isolation, fatigue, operational trauma and limited support, psychological risk assessment should not be regarded as an optional wellbeing initiative. It should be treated as a fundamental work health and safety control.

Reform has occurred but activity is not evidence of success

It would be inaccurate and unfair to suggest that NT Police has done nothing since 2022. There has been significant investment and considerable organisational activity. Reported measures include an annual investment of approximately $3 million under the 2023–2027 Wellbeing Strategy, more than 800 mental health first aid completions since July 2022, WellChecks, psychological resilience training, enhanced critical-incident responses, 12 months of post-separation psychological access, an early intervention project and, eventually, a formal fatigue management policy.

Some of those initiatives directly address issues raised in my original piece. Post-separation support, for example, recognises that leaving policing does not necessarily remove psychological risk. For an injured officer, separation can mean simultaneously losing career, identity, routine, colleagues, purpose and belonging. Proactive WellChecks can potentially reduce reliance upon self-referral. Better critical-incident responses can help ensure people are not simply expected to absorb trauma and continue.

These are worthwhile developments. But this is also where scrutiny needs to become more sophisticated.

Expenditure demonstrates investment. Training numbers demonstrate participation. The existence of a strategy demonstrates intent. WellCheck numbers demonstrate activity. None of those measures, in isolation, demonstrates prevention.

The measures that matter are whether fewer officers are developing serious psychological injuries; whether emerging injuries are being identified earlier; whether members are accessing evidence-based specialist treatment more quickly; whether fatigue and excessive overtime are reducing; whether accumulated leave is triggering intervention; whether remote officers are safer; whether injured employees are achieving sustainable return-to-work outcomes; and whether serving members genuinely trust the organisation’s psychological services.

On those questions, the publicly available evidence remains far less clear.

My 2026 review concluded that while reform had commenced, NT Police had not publicly demonstrated that the psychological health of its workforce had measurably improved. Several important safeguards remained under development, delayed or unresolved, and publicly available information did not establish whether members were being injured less frequently, identified earlier or treated more effectively.

A strategy under scrutiny

The quality of the underlying strategy has itself subsequently been questioned. Professor Alexander McFarlane’s review of the NT Police Wellbeing Strategy 2023–2027 identified substantial weaknesses.

According to the material considered in my review, the strategy did not clearly identify the interventions most likely to improve members’ mental health, inadequately explained how distress progresses into psychological injury and failed to establish sufficiently clear clinical pathways. Most significantly, the review concluded that the strategy’s emphasis on general wellbeing came at the expense of adequately addressing workplace psychological injury

This is more than a debate about terminology. “Wellbeing” and “prevention of psychological injury” are not interchangeable concepts. Exercise, resilience education, peer support, mental health literacy and social connection may all contribute positively to wellbeing. But if an employee is exposed to excessive demands, inadequate recovery, chronic understaffing, traumatic incidents or prolonged isolation, improving their personal wellbeing does not remove the hazard.

The distinction is the same one applied to physical safety. We would never tell an employee exposed to an uncontrolled physical hazard that the principal solution was to become more resilient. We would identify the hazard, assess the risk and implement controls. Psychological safety deserves the same seriousness.

Clinical capacity remains a legitimate question

The capacity of the clinical system also deserves scrutiny. During 2024–25, NT Police employed approximately 1,375 sworn members while its Wellbeing services reportedly had two psychologists and five social workers. By July 2025, six clinicians were available to undertake WellChecks, with estimated capacity for approximately 450 checks each year. A proposed expansion capable of increasing this to approximately 2,550 annually had not been approved when coronial evidence concluded in August 2025.

That does not mean every police officer requires clinical intervention, nor does staffing alone determine the quality of a psychological-health system. But if proactive identification and early intervention are central to the organisation’s approach, there must be sufficient specialist capacity to respond when risk is identified.

Early identification without timely access to appropriate treatment is not early intervention.

The most confronting question may be how the organisation learns from death

Perhaps one of the most significant findings concerns what happened organisationally after Michael died. The Coroner found force in criticism that NT Police had not independently undertaken a sufficiently robust investigation into the organisational circumstances surrounding his psychological injury and death and expressed concern about the apparent reluctance to investigate and understand the contribution of occupational trauma and workplace stressors.

This resulted in a recommendation for a formal root-cause analysis model following the suspected self-inflicted death of an NT Police member.

That finding deserves serious reflection.

Police organisations understand investigation better than almost any institution. When something goes catastrophically wrong operationally, evidence is gathered, circumstances reconstructed, decisions examined and systems reviewed. The purpose is not always to find an individual at fault. It is to understand what happened and prevent recurrence.

Serious psychological injury should attract the same organisational curiosity.

What occupational exposures existed? What information was available? Were warning signs visible across different parts of the organisation but never connected? Were controls adequate? Did staffing, fatigue, workload or organisational processes contribute? What lessons can be identified, and how will implementation be independently verified?

Root-cause analysis does not mean declaring that every suicide was preventable. Nor should it become an exercise in retrospectively blaming individual managers, clinicians or colleagues. It is about recognising that psychological safety is a systems responsibility and that serious incidents demand organisational learning.

Four years later, accountability must mean outcomes

In 2022, I asked what value NT Police was placing on life. Four years later, I believe there is a better and more objective question: Can NT Police demonstrate that its members are psychologically safer today than they were then?

That question should be answerable.

NT Police should be able to publicly demonstrate progress against the recommendations arising from the Police Review, the independent review of its Wellbeing Strategy and the coronial findings. Reporting should show which recommendations have been implemented, which remain outstanding, who has executive responsibility, what timeframes apply and, crucially, how success will be measured.

The public does not need confidential information about individual officers. De-identified data can show trends in psychological injury, mental-stress claims, fatigue exposure, excessive overtime, accumulated leave, access to specialist assessment, return-to-work outcomes, medical separation and confidence in psychological services. Remote policing controls can be reported without compromising operational security.

This is not unreasonable scrutiny of a police organisation. It is precisely the type of accountability expected when an employer knows that its workforce is routinely exposed to significant psychosocial hazards.

The NT Police Wellbeing Strategy itself promised leadership, governance and measures of success. The next step is demonstrating those outcomes publicly.

This is no longer simply a mental health conversation

The greatest change in my own thinking since writing that first opinion piece is that I no longer regard this principally as a conversation about mental health services. Of course police officers need confidential, culturally appropriate, evidence-based psychological and psychiatric treatment. Peer support matters. Families matter. Mental health literacy matters. Early intervention matters.

But this issue is larger than the wellbeing unit.

It is a work health and safety issue because psychological hazards arise from the design and management of work. It is a workforce issue because staffing and supervision affect exposure and recovery. It is a leadership issue because organisational priorities determine whether operational demands are allowed to override wellbeing. It is a remote-policing issue because isolation and one-up policing create distinctive risks. It is a cultural issue because stigma and stoicism influence disclosure. And ultimately, it is an accountability issue because organisations should be able to demonstrate whether the controls they introduce are actually working.

Police officers understand that their profession carries unavoidable risks. Nobody joins policing expecting to be protected from every traumatic experience. Officers know they will encounter violence, death, grief and suffering. They know that sometimes they will be placed in danger to protect somebody else.

But accepting the inherent risks of policing is fundamentally different from accepting psychological injury caused or aggravated by organisational hazards that could reasonably have been identified and controlled.

The Northern Territory asks extraordinary things of its police officers. In return, those officers and their families should be entitled to an organisation prepared to exercise the same diligence in investigating and controlling psychological hazards as it would any other serious workplace risk.

We knew enough to act. Now we need to know whether it worked

Four years ago, serving and former officers were already speaking about these issues. I wrote publicly about inadequate support, burnout, stigma, self-referral, return-to-work difficulties, families being overlooked and the need for proactive intervention. NT Police’s subsequent Wellbeing Strategy acknowledged many of the same problems. The Police Review added further evidence. Professor McFarlane questioned whether the strategy sufficiently addressed workplace psychological injury. The Coroner’s examination of Michael Deutrom’s death has now provided the most confronting evidence of all.

There is therefore little value in another debate about whether police mental health is a serious issue. That question has been answered.

Nor should Michael’s death be reduced to an argument that one missed opportunity or one policy change would necessarily have altered the outcome. That would oversimplify suicide and diminish the complexity of his experience. The more important lesson is that psychological injury can accumulate over years while a capable and committed officer continues performing, and that a mature occupational safety system cannot place the primary burden of recognition and disclosure upon the injured person.

NT Police has made changes. Those changes deserve acknowledgement. But after four years, strategies, expenditure and program participation can no longer be the principal measures of progress.

The standard must now be outcomes.

Show serving members that serious psychological injuries are reducing. Show them that fatigue is being controlled. Show them that remote postings have appropriate psychological safeguards. Show them that asking for help will not quietly damage their careers. Show them that specialist care is available early rather than after somebody reaches crisis. Show families that they will not become invisible when policing follows an officer home. Show former members that leaving the organisation does not mean being abandoned by it. And show the Northern Territory community that lessons from serious psychological injury and death result in sustained organisational change.

In 2022, I finished my piece by asking NT Police, the NT government, the NT Police Association, and fellow officers to contact struggling members rather than waiting for them to reach out.

Four years later, I would amend that message.

Do not simply build a system that waits for psychologically injured police officers to ask for help. Build an organisation that identifies foreseeable psychological hazards, controls them wherever reasonably possible, recognises deterioration earlier and reaches people before they reach breaking point.

The evidence available today is far stronger than it was when I first raised these concerns. So too must be the response.

After everything that has happened, and everything we now know, Northern Territory police officers and their families deserve more than another promise that wellbeing is a priority.

They deserve evidence that it is.

Paul Milne is a former NT Police sergeant who served for more than a decade across frontline, supervisory and remote policing roles. He was medically retired from policing in 2017 following occupational psychological injury and PTSD and subsequently moved with his family to Victoria, where he accessed specialist mental health treatment. Since leaving policing, Paul has worked extensively in mental health and lived-experience advocacy, with a particular focus on psychological safety, trauma-informed leadership and systems reform. He currently serves as a director of several national mental health organisations and contributes to Suicide Prevention Australia’s initiatives in Victoria.

If you or anyone you know is experiencing mental health difficulties, please contact the NT Mental Health Line on 1800 682 288, Lifeline on 13 11 14, Beyondblue on 1300 224 636, 13YARN (a service run by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people) or Mensline Australia on 1300 789 978.

For more mental health support you can also visit the NT Lived Experience Network website here.