Working With Traumatized Police-officer Patients ─ A Clinician's Guide to Complex Ptsd Syndromes in Public Safety Professionals

An insider perspective from a "cop doc on the job," this book is the first of its kind written in response to a need for a specialized guide for clinicians that operationally defines and responsibly treats what Dan Rudofossi terms Police and Public Safety Complex PTSD. In reading this book, you are led through an understanding of how to work with police officers who experience cumulative loss in trauma. "Doc Dan" initiates you into an original cultural competence of how and why his theory works in practice. You will leave the journey with a practical sense of how the ecological context and ethological motivation are part of the psychological presentation of almost all officers suffering from complex trauma and loss. This guide is crucial reading, original in its breadth and scope of perspective on how to intervene with the traumatized officer. Toward that end, Rudofossi presents his Eco-Ethological Existential Analysis of Police and Public Safety Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Emotive, affective, cognitive, behavioral, and existential ranges of expression of trauma are vast, diverse, and often intense in police officers. This book delivers applied theory with clinical examples, including practical interventions for the clinician and handouts for the officer-patient. The clinician will be assisted in encountering officers' existential suffering from the edge of despair to the precipice of meaning. The guide is at once stimulating, exciting, and very serious in its potential for clinical interventions.

Dan Rudofossi is the real deal: street cop, sergeant, commanding officer, who patrolled "urban war zones," effecting more than 200 arrests without a complaint when New York was described as the murder capital of the United States. That experience and credibility has helped him numerous times in relating to officers and working through assessment, crisis, and therapy with hundreds of officers. What he offers in his book is the combined result of more than a decade of being a street cop and a licensed psychologist who conducted research, ambulatory assessments, and therapy with hundreds of officers. Rudofossi is a licensed psychologist and is certified in the several psychotherapies: Fellow in Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, Albert Ellis Institute; Psychodynamic Psychotherapy, New York Psychoanalytic Institute and Society; and Clinician Diplomate in Logotherapy, Viktor Frankl Institute of Logotherapy. He is Adjunct Associate Professor at New York University and Clinical Supervisor at Yeshiva University Ferkauf School of Psychology/Albert Einstein School of Medicine. Rudofossi has interviewed, assessed, and treated hundreds of officers in his extensive clinical, treatment, and research experience as Uniform Psychologist/Police Sergeant, New York Police Department. He continues in his private practice to work with traumatized police officers and is on the Board of Advisors, Saybrook University Clinical Psychology, Ph.D. Program in Police and Public Safety.