Firefighter Mental Health Funding That Reaches the Crew

I recently sat down with a metropolitan fire department battalion chief I have known for most of my career. During our conversation he admitted he was struggling, and he was not using the department's employee assistance program. He did not feel comfortable calling someone he had never met, someone he doubted could relate to him or tell him anything useful.

I have heard a version of that scenario my whole career. I spent 25 years in the fire service and retired in 2022 from Las Vegas Fire & Rescue as the special operations chief. For most of those years, mental health support meant the kitchen table and a traveling counselor who made station visits. She was a valuable resource but used reluctantly, because of the stigma. A month before I retired, one of our firefighters and former member of my downtown crew, an Army veteran with a wife and two kids, became another statistic by taking his own life. He was not the first firefighter I knew who died that way, and he has not been the last since my retirement. Addiction has taken others.

The Money Is Starting to Move

In August 2026, a bipartisan group in the House led by Rep. Andrea Salinas of Oregon introduced the Lifeline for First Responders Act. It would authorize $7.5 million a year through fiscal 2032 for a new EMS and First Responder Wellness Grant Program at the Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, through its Office of Emergency Medical Services. Permitted uses include mental health and wellness services, suicide prevention, confidential counseling, peer support, family support and stigma reduction. It is a bill rather than law, and its sponsors describe it as the first federal grant program written specifically for firefighters, paramedics and dispatchers.

Cities are putting money in, too. In May 2026, the Anacortes City Council in Washington approved its plan for a $270,000 state behavioral health grant, the Skagit Valley Herald reported, and part of it pays for regional behavioral health response training for firefighters and EMS providers. In Florida, Deerfield Beach voted in January 2026 to leave the Broward Sheriff's Office and build its own police and fire rescue departments by September 2027. Deerfield Beach now gets to decide how it will take care of the responders answering 911 calls before the first shift ever clocks in.

Proactive measures to address the mental well-being of our first responders are long overdue. Having been responsible for procurement, I understand how easy it is to reserve precious funds for mission critical equipment. Nothing is more mission critical than the men and women who staff the stations and respond when the calls come in. It is time to rethink the investment in the people we rely on every day.

Start With the 92%

The U.S. Fire Administration, citing the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance, reports that more firefighters die by suicide each year than in the line of duty, and that many more go unreported. USFA also cites a 2018 Ruderman Family Foundation report finding that public safety personnel are five times more likely than civilians to have symptoms of PTSD and depression. The International Association of Fire Fighters reports that civilians experience about three traumatic events in a lifetime while firefighters experience nine a year.

The trauma stacks up and goes unaddressed. USFA reports that up to 92% of surveyed firefighters name stigma as a reason for their unwillingness to get help. If I could highlight one number at every budget meeting, it would be that 92%. A department can sign the best employee assistance contract in the state, however, the resource is of no use if the phone never gets picked up by the first responder who needs it.

It is no secret that firefighters do not sleep well. Poor sleep, hyperarousal and foggy thinking are common, and very few are willing to describe those symptoms to a stranger on the phone. In raw terms, first responders use employee assistance programs about as often as the general workforce, and slightly more by some counts. Measured against their much higher rates of PTSD, depression and suicide risk, that level of use still leaves a large gap. Research points to occupational stigma, meaning the fear of being seen as unfit for duty, along with confidentiality concerns and doubts about whether counselors understand the job.

Chiefs feel this strain in the budget before they see it in a report. Almost every chief I talk to brings up early retirements, recruiting and retention of people they spent years and hundreds of thousands of dollars training. A common scene is standing in front of a city council, a county commission or a board of directors every month to explain why overtime ran over. The part that goes untracked and unreported is that some of that overtime is backfill for the men and women who called in sick because of the mental toll of the job.

Give Crews Something They Will Use

Virtual reality is already part of public safety training. In 2023, police in Mason City, Iowa, used a federal grant to put their officers through VR training on behavioral health crises. Most VR training in our world is built to raise stress so people learn to work under pressure. We built Neurova Academy for the hours after the call, when a crew member has to settle, sleep and get ready for the next one.

A crew member can train at the station between calls, standing in about a square meter of floor space, without booking an appointment or sitting in a waiting room. The program runs offline and collects no personally identifiable information in normal use. Every session moves through the same six phases: Activate, Challenge, Sequence, React, Switch and Recover. Recover is a guided cooldown with box breathing and binaural audio, designed to settle a crew member before stepping back out into the rest of the shift.

The scenarios adjust to each person in real time, and every session produces performance data a department can review. Agencies that want more can add the optional iXpressGenes CoreSignals Panel, which reads 22 markers of RNA gene expression from whole blood and is designed to track inflammatory and immune signals associated with stress and recovery. It is not used to diagnose any condition. iXpressGenes is a CLIA-certified, CAP-accredited laboratory. Our measurement page states the panel's limits in full.

You do not need new staff to run it. We train and certify facilitators from your agency as part of the package, so you run it on your own schedule. A cycle runs four days, one session a day of about 30 minutes.

The part crew members tend to like most is that they do not have to talk about it. They put the headset on and do the work.

More Sleep

As previously stated, firefighters do not sleep well. Our pilot highlights sleep as the most promising reason to do the protocol. Participants reported a 22% improvement in sleep quality, and the strongest responders gained roughly 51 additional minutes of sleep a night. The need for quality recovery after a busy shift can't be overstated to the first responder or their family member(s).

Observed Results From the Pilot

Our pilot with the YMCA of Orange County ran at three locations and enrolled more than 100 members and community participants. Of those enrolled, 84% completed the program and 96% reported a positive experience.

Participants also reported a 28% change in stress and anxiety measures. Among those who came in carrying the highest psychological burden, the reported change was 85.7%. Outcomes were tracked with standardized self-report instruments, including the PCL-5, and 95% of participants agreed their trainer made the experience comfortable. The findings are preliminary, and the YMCA of Orange County is working with Greater Than Analytics on further analysis.

Those participants were a community population rather than a specific cohort of first responders. Some were veterans and first responders, and a firefighter-specific data set is the gap. That gap is an opportunity for a department looking to lead the way in firefighter mental health. Our full position on what the evidence in this category supports is on our claims page.

The Road From the Firehouse

My master's work at the Naval Postgraduate School's Center for Homeland Defense and Security taught me to take on complex problems, do the research and turn findings into something practical. Having struggled with PTSD myself, that is exactly what I have done. I am fortunate to have found my team at Neurova Labs.

I would like to see brain training in every firehouse, as standard as a turnout coat and an SCBA. If your department has new wellness funding, a grant that prioritizes firefighter wellness, or you are building a new department, send me a message at craig@neurovalabs.com. I understand the challenges, and from my own experience I can tell you it does not have to be as lonely and difficult as it feels.

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Neurova Academy is a general wellness and cognitive training program. It is not a medical device and is not offered to diagnose, treat, cure, or mitigate any disease or condition, including concussion, traumatic brain injury, or CTE. Outcomes described reflect observational pilot findings and individual experience, and are not a prediction of results for anyone else. Individual results vary. Laboratory testing provided by iXpressGenes, a CLIA-certified, CAP-accredited laboratory. References to news reporting, government publications and legislation are for commentary only and do not imply endorsement of Neurova Labs by any government entity.

Media contact: nathaniel.free@neurovalabs.com