Psychological Network Structure of Occupational Mental Health in Canadian Firefighters

Firefighters demonstrate high rates of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety, but inconsistency in risk and protective factors across studies limits the development of effective occupational health promotion strategies. Psychological network modelling is an emerging statistical technique that facilitates exploratory analysis to help identify influential factors when accounting for numerous variables without strong a priori expectations. The present cross-sectional survey study evaluated the psychological network structure of commonly studied individual and organizational correlates of posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety in Canadian firefighters to identify influential factors in occupational mental health. We provide a proof-of-principle demonstration of how psychological network modelling can be used to integrate theory and practice by generating insights and hypotheses to facilitate the design and testing of novel workplace interventions. The network model demonstrated good stability. Accounting for individual and organizational factors together with mental health outcomes, symptoms of intrusion and depression, alongside nontraumatic job stress, emerged as the most central nodes in the network. Hostility and coping self-efficacy were the most important individual-level nodes associated with mental health outcomes, while personality, empathy, years of service, physical job demands, and workplace social support were of low importance for understanding the overall landscape of mental health in firefighters. These results begin to highlight the potential for network theory to inform the design of evidence-based interventions spanning mental health and organizational climate. Concrete suggestions for testable intervention designs in the Canadian context are provided.