Effectiveness of psychological skills training for police personnel: a meta-analysis

Abstract

There has been an increasing interest in primary prevention programmes developed to improve police officers’ mental health. This meta-analysis synthesised the existing findings on psychological skills training for police personnel including resilience training and mindfulness-based training. Particularly, this study systematically assessed the effectiveness of training programmes on mental health outcomes including resilience, depression, anxiety and perceived stress. A comprehensive search of EBSCO, ProQuest and Web of Science was conducted for studies written in English from 1999 to 2022. Two independent researchers screened 5604 studies. Eligible studies are intervention studies with controlled trials that involved training programmes to improve participants’ mental health and reported at least one of the following outcomes: resilience, depression, anxiety and perceived stress. The meta-analysis estimated standardised mean differences (SMDs) for each of the four outcomes. A total of 12 studies, involving 2298 police personnel from 8 countries, met the criteria for inclusion and quality assessment. The training programmes of the eligible studies varied in training approaches, duration, total sessions and followup periods. The results suggest that training programmes have a statistically significant moderate effect on depression (SMD=−0.47, 95% CI=−0.73 to −0.22) and anxiety (SMD=−0.40, 95% CI=−0.73 to −0.06), while the effects on resilience (SMD=1.03, 95% CI=−0.36 to 2.41) and perceived stress (SMD=−1.03, 95% CI=−2.15 to 0.08) are not statistically significant. This study highlights the role of primary prevention approaches in supporting officers’ mental health by showing that training programmes are effective in mitigating the risk of depression and anxiety.