Mental Edge Mondays: The $80 Haircut and the $12 Haircut

The fire service spends heavily to protect its equipment, yet we treat the psychological expertise that protects its people as an optional expense

There are certain things in life where bargain hunting makes perfect sense. Paper towels. Coffee filters. Shop rags. Generic ibuprofen. I’m all for saving money when saving money makes sense.

But there are other places where going cheap can get ugly fast. Technically, anyone with a pair of scissors or a razor can give you an effective haircut. If this is your only criterion, the $12 haircut and the $80 haircut are equally successful. Hair was long. Now it’s short.

During COVID, like a lot of families, we bought hair clippers and decided we could handle this ourselves. I gave my husband and son haircuts. It turns out I could take a perfectly good-looking kid and, in under 20 minutes, make him look like a mangy dog.

There are no photographs of the haircuts I gave during this period. This is intentional.

This brings me to firefighter psychology.

Special Forces Figured Out Something Critical

I’ve spent more than 20 years working closely with military service members, veterans, first responders and other protectors and defenders. One thing I’ve always appreciated about the Special Operations community is that they understand something fundamental: their most valuable asset is their people.

They certainly spend money on equipment. Lots of it. They have mind-bogglingly sophisticated technology, specialized training and weapons systems that cost more than most of us will earn in a lifetime. But they also understand that none of that matters very much without the human being operating it.

So they invest in those human beings accordingly. And importantly, they don’t wait until someone is falling apart to bring expertise around them. They invest in people who are already exceptional because the objective in Special Forces isn’t simply to repair them when something goes wrong. It’s to keep exceptional people exceptional.

Then There’s the Fire Service

Fire departments also understand the importance of investing in high-performance equipment. A new apparatus can cost millions. Nobody expects a fire chief to explain why Engine 4 needs preventive maintenance by proving it’s broken. Nobody waits until the brakes fail to decide that perhaps somebody should have been paying attention to them.

It’s obvious to everyone in the fire service – when something is mission-critical, you protect the investment.

Then we get to the human being. A department may have an opportunity to bring in highly specialized psychological expertise from someone who deeply understands firefighter culture, cumulative trauma, moral injury, relationships, nervous-system activation, suicide risk, leadership dynamics and the specific psychology of people who regularly risk their lives for strangers.

And remarkably often, the answer is: “We see the value of this, we really do, but we don’t have the funds.”

Sometimes that same department is paying enormous amounts of overtime because good firefighters are out on stress leave. Or managing workers’ compensation claims, disability retirements, preventable relationship fallout, performance problems, or the loss of their most talented people – people they spent years recruiting, training and developing.

Apparently, they have the money once the problem gets expensive. They just don’t always have it while the person is doing well.

We May Be Putting Psychology in the Wrong Budget

Part of the problem, I think, is that we still tend to put psychological expertise into the “mental health bucket.” Mental health belongs with problems. Problems belong with people who are struggling. Therefore, spending money on psychological expertise when people are doing well can feel optional.

But what if we put psychological expertise somewhere else?

What if some psychological expertise belongs in the same conceptual category as training, readiness, professional development and performance protection?

Instead of asking, Why would we spend money on this when our people are doing fine?, we might ask, What does it cost us to keep our best people operating at their best?

Licensed Does Not Mean Interchangeable

There is another curious assumption I often observe within the fire service: that psychological expertise is largely interchangeable.

Licensed psychologist? Check.

Therapist who works with first responders? Check.

EAP? Check.

Clinician list? Check.

Psychology box checked.

We don’t reason this way about almost anything else with meaningful stakes. If you needed brain surgery, you probably wouldn’t be terribly reassured if someone told you, “Don’t worry. We found a licensed physician.”

You would have a few follow-up questions.

What kind of physician? How much experience do they have with this particular problem? How often do they do this? How good are they? Have they worked extensively with people like me?

This makes all the difference in the fire service because firefighters don’t simply have unusual jobs. They inhabit an unusual psychological ecosystem. The culture shapes how people communicate, what they disclose, what they conceal, how they experience loyalty, what threatens identity, what earns trust, what destroys it, and even what distress can look like.

Someone can understand general psychology exceptionally well and still misunderstand firefighters. In fact, expertise can sometimes create its own blind spots. The more deeply trained you are in conventional psychology, and the more confident you become in your ability to understand human behavior generally, the easier it can be to assume the same frameworks apply equally well to everyone.

But firefighters know they don’t.This is why one of the most common things I hear from firefighters is some version of, “There just aren’t enough docs who get it.” They’re not saying there aren’t enough psychologists or therapists. They’re saying there aren’t enough who understand them.

The Math Gets Interesting

Consider an experienced firefighter who has taken 10 or 15 years to develop. Think about what is actually contained inside that person: thousands of calls, pattern recognition that can’t be taught in a classroom, judgment built through experience, relationships, credibility, institutional knowledge and the ability to walk onto a chaotic scene and notice something a newer firefighter simply won’t see yet. You can’t order another one from a catalog.

Now consider what happens when that person is out for six months. There’s overtime and backfill, certainly, but there may also be workers’ compensation costs, administrative time, treatment expenses, disruption to the crew, lost productivity and, in some cases, the eventual loss of someone the department spent a decade developing.

Suddenly, investing in highly specialized expertise upstream doesn’t look particularly extravagant. It now comes into focus as a logical investment.

Maybe the Question Is Backwards

I don’t think the answer is for fire departments to spend indiscriminately on more wellness programs. In fact, I think the opposite may be true. The next evolution should involve becoming much more discerning about where expertise actually adds value.

Who understands your people deeply enough to notice what others might miss? Who can help your leaders think through complicated human situations before they become expensive ones? Who understands the difference between treating illness and protecting performance? Who would you want available when the problem is unusual enough that the ordinary answers aren’t quite good enough?

These aren’t questions about whether firefighters are broken. They are questions about how seriously we take the job of protecting an extraordinarily valuable human asset.

Special Operations figured this out a long time ago. Their people are expensive to develop, difficult to replace and essential to the mission, so high-level expertise around human performance isn’t viewed as an indulgence reserved for the damaged. It’s part of protecting the investment.

Maybe the fire service is ready for a little more of that thinking.

After all, you can spend $80 or $12 on a haircut.

Shauna ‘Doc’ Springer, PhD is a pioneering psychologist, award-winning Military Times podcast host, and one of the world’s leading experts on psychological trauma, moral injury, suicide prevention, close relationships and the unique needs of the military and first responder communities. Doc Springer provides highly specialized consultation and confidential advising to organizations and public safety agencies that support protectors and defenders through her company THIN LINE ADVISORY.