I didn't think I was broken. That was the whole problem.
Twenty-two years with the FDNY. Ladder 31, then Engine 74, a stint at Rescue 3. I made it through every kind of call you can imagine — five-alarm warehouse fires in the Bronx, a building collapse on Fordham Road, more car wrecks than I can count, and one night in 2004 that I still can't talk about without my hands shaking. I walked into burning buildings for a living and walked out again. I figured that made me tough.
It didn't. It made me numb. And numb isn't the same thing as okay, no matter how many times you tell yourself it is.
The culture of "I'm fine"
If you've never worked in a firehouse, let me explain how mental health works there: it doesn't. You come back from a bad call, you sit in the kitchen, somebody makes a pot of coffee that tastes like motor oil, and you crack jokes. That's the protocol. That's the therapy. You saw a kid who didn't make it? Put it in the box. You pulled a woman out of a window and her skin came off in your hands? Put it in the box. You heard screaming that didn't sound human? Box.
The box is where everything goes. And for a long time, I thought the box was bottomless.
Nobody ever sat us down and said "Hey, it's okay to not be okay." That phrase didn't exist in our world. What existed was: "You good?" And the only answer was: "Yeah, I'm good." You said it after the worst night of your life. You said it at funerals. You said it when you hadn't slept in three days and you were drinking at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday. I'm good.
I was not good.
The calls that stayed
Some calls leave marks and some calls leave holes. There's a difference. A mark is something you remember — it's bad, but you can file it somewhere and keep going. A hole is something that removes a piece of you, and whatever was there before doesn't grow back.
March 2007. Residential fire in Washington Heights. We got the call at 2:14 a.m. Apartment building, third floor fully involved. When we made entry, it was bad — heavy smoke, zero visibility, the kind of heat that makes your gear feel like tinfoil. We did a primary search and I found a bedroom. I found a crib. I don't need to tell you what I found in the crib because you already know, and I'm not going to put those words in print because I still see it when I close my eyes.
The mother was in the hallway. She'd gotten disoriented in the smoke. She was eight feet from the front door. Eight feet. When she came to in the ambulance and asked about her baby, I was the one standing there. I didn't say anything. I couldn't say anything. The sound she made is in the box. The box is where that lives.
Then there was September 2013. Probie named Kevin Whitfield, 23 years old, six months on the job. Good kid — annoyingly enthusiastic, always first one to grab the irons, had that energy where you knew he was going to be great if he lasted long enough. Commercial fire on Jerome Avenue, nothing we hadn't seen before. Floor gave out. Kevin went through. We got him out, but the burns were — it was bad. He hung on for eleven days. Eleven days of his mother sitting in that ICU. I visited twice and then I stopped going because I couldn't look at him and I hated myself for not being able to look at him.
After Kevin died, I went back to the firehouse. Someone asked if I was good. I said yeah, I'm good.
September 11th and the long after
I was there that day. I'm not going to make this whole piece about it because enough has been written and enough hasn't been, and I don't know which category my words fall into. What I will say is this: the day itself was one thing. The years after were another.
People think the trauma of 9/11 was the towers. It was, partly. But it was also the funerals. We went to 343 funerals. Some of those guys I knew. Tommy Brennan from my academy class. Mike Russo who used to let me borrow his truck. Guys I'd had dinner with the week before. We wore our dress blues so many times that fall that the fabric wore thin at the elbows.
And then came the sickness. The coughing. Guys who were there at the pile, breathing that air, being told it was safe when it wasn't. Watching them get diagnosed one by one. Lung disease. Cancer. A guy I shared a locker room with for eight years died of a blood cancer at 44. His name was Pete Donovan and he was the funniest person I've ever known. He used to do this impression of our battalion chief that would make you fall out of your chair. He weighed 110 pounds at the end.
The thing about slow deaths is they don't get the same attention as the fast ones. Nobody runs a siren for a guy who's dying in a hospital bed over 18 months. But you're watching it. And you're wondering if you're next. And you're still going to work and running into fires because that's what you do.
The drinking, the silence, and the three a.m. ceiling
I started drinking more around 2010. Not in a dramatic movie way. Not like I was hiding bottles. Just — more. A beer after shift became two, became four, became a six-pack on the couch while I stared at the TV without actually watching it. My wife Laura would come into the room and say something and I wouldn't hear her. Not because the TV was loud. Because I wasn't there. I was somewhere in that box in my head, trying to keep the lid on.
We stopped talking about anything real. She'd ask me how my day was and I'd say "fine" and she'd know I was lying and I'd know she knew and we'd both pretend. That's how you lose a marriage — not in one big explosion but in a thousand small silences.
The worst part was 3 a.m. That's when the box opens whether you want it to or not. I'd lie there staring at the ceiling, and it was like a slideshow of every bad thing I'd ever seen. The crib. Kevin. Pete. Tommy. The woman on the hallway floor. The sound of a roof about to give way. All of it, playing on loop, and I couldn't turn it off. I'd get up and go sit in the kitchen in the dark and wait for it to stop. Some nights it stopped. Some nights I was still sitting there when the sun came up.
Laura left in 2016. She told me she loved me but she couldn't live with a ghost. She was right. I was haunting my own house.
The guys we lost to the quiet
Between 2015 and 2019, I knew four firefighters and two EMTs who took their own lives. Four firefighters. In the FDNY. One of them, Billy Kovacs, I'd worked with for six years. He was the last person you'd expect — always laughing, always the one organizing the barbecues, always checking on everybody else. Classic deflection, but I didn't know that word then.
Billy shot himself on a Sunday afternoon while his wife was at the grocery store. He was 41.
After Billy, I went to the department's counseling service once. I sat in the waiting room for twenty minutes, saw a guy from another house walk out, and I left. I left because I was afraid he'd tell people I was there. That's how deep the stigma goes. You're less afraid of dying in a fire than you are of someone knowing you talked to a therapist.
The department had an EAP — Employee Assistance Program. It was a joke, and everybody knew it was a joke. Three sessions and you're cured? For twenty years of accumulated horror? And the whole time you're worried it's going on some file somewhere, that it'll affect your career, your pension. The system wasn't built for people who needed help. It was built so the department could say it had a system.
The crack in the armor
What finally got through to me wasn't a program or a pamphlet or a mandated wellness check. It was my daughter.
Maggie was 19 in 2018. She was home from college for Thanksgiving, and we were alone in the kitchen — Laura and I had been divorced for two years by then. I was doing the dishes and she said, very quietly: "Dad, I'm scared you're going to kill yourself."
I dropped a plate. I actually dropped a plate and it broke on the floor and I just stood there looking at the pieces. I said, "Maggie, I would never —" and she said, "You don't sleep. You don't eat. You drink every night. You don't talk to anyone. You look like you're already gone."
She was crying. My kid was standing in my kitchen, crying, telling me she was afraid to go back to school because she thought she'd get a phone call. And the thing that hit me — the thing that cracked the whole box wide open — was that she wasn't wrong. I hadn't been actively thinking about it. But I hadn't not been thinking about it either. There's a space between wanting to die and wanting to live, and I'd been standing in that space for years without admitting it.
I called the FDNY counseling unit the next Monday. This time I went in.
Getting help when you don't know how
Here's what I'll tell you about therapy: it's not what you think it is. I went in expecting to lie on a couch and talk about my childhood. Instead I got a psychologist named Dr. Amara Williams who specialized in first responders and who, on our first session, said: "I'm not going to ask you to be vulnerable. I'm going to ask you to be honest. There's a difference."
That distinction saved me. Vulnerability felt like weakness. Honesty felt like — well, it felt like doing the job. You report what you see. You give accurate information. That's it.
I got diagnosed with PTSD, which I already knew but hearing it from a professional with letters after her name made it real in a way that self-diagnosis doesn't. She put me on a treatment plan — EMDR, some medication for sleep, and regular talk therapy. No magic. No overnight fix. Just the slow, boring, unglamorous work of unpacking twenty years of boxes.
The EMDR was the hardest. For anyone who doesn't know, it's Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. Sounds like sci-fi. Basically, you revisit traumatic memories while doing guided eye movements, and it helps your brain process what it couldn't process at the time. The first session, I talked about Kevin Whitfield and I cried for forty-five minutes. I hadn't cried since I was twelve years old.
It's been about eight years now. I'm not cured — I don't think that's how this works. But I sleep most nights. I don't drink anymore. Laura and I aren't back together but we're friends, real friends, and Maggie doesn't worry about phone calls anymore.
What I'm doing now
I retired in 2020. Got my twenty and my pension and my bad knee and my tinnitus and my nightmares that come less often now. And then I went back in a different way.
I'm a peer support specialist with a nonprofit called Fireshield that works with active-duty firefighters and EMTs on mental health. Basically, I'm the guy who sits down with someone and says: "I know. I've been there. And here's what I wish someone had told me."
We go into firehouses. We don't show up with clipboards or surveys. We show up with pizza and we sit in the kitchen and we talk. Sometimes it takes three visits before anyone says anything real. That's fine. That's the job.
Last year I worked with a lieutenant — I'll call him Chris — who'd been on for fifteen years and was exactly where I'd been. Drinking, not sleeping, marriage falling apart, still telling everyone he was fine. It took four months of regular contact before he agreed to talk to a therapist. Four months. But he went. He went, and he's still going, and his wife told me she got her husband back.
One at a time. That's how it works.
What I want you to know
If you're a firefighter, a cop, an EMT, a paramedic, a soldier, a nurse — anyone who does a job where you see the worst things humans do to each other and to themselves — I want you to hear this:
You're not weak for struggling. You're injured. And just like you'd get treatment for a broken femur or a torn ACL, you need to get treatment for this. PTSD is an injury. It's your brain doing what brains do when they absorb more horror than they were designed to hold. It's not a character flaw. It's not a failure. It's physics.
The culture is changing, slowly. Departments are starting to take this seriously. Peer support programs are growing. The silence is getting a little less silent. But we're not where we need to be. Not by a long shot.
If you're sitting in your kitchen at 3 a.m., staring at nothing, with a box in your head that's starting to come open — please, pick up the phone. Call someone. Call the Crisis Line. Call a buddy. Call me. I'm serious about that. I'm not hard to find.
You spent your career running into buildings that everyone else was running out of. You can do this too. I promise you, the other side of that door is worth getting to.
Daniel O'Connor served with the FDNY from 1998 to 2020. He is a certified peer support specialist with Fireshield and an advocate for first responder mental health reform. He lives in Yonkers with a poorly behaved rescue dog named Hose.
If you or someone you know is struggling, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7. Call or text 988. For first responder-specific support, contact the Fire/EMS Helpline at 1-888-731-FIRE (3473).