Published November 29, 2010

There is an interesting paragraph inside the Globe’s follow-up story about the suicide of Middlesex Sheriff James DiPaola:

DiPaola’s death also underscored a chillingly high rate of suicides among members of law enforcement.

In 1999, a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that male police officers are more than twice as likely as the general population to suffer from depression, and that nearly a quarter of male and female officers have thoughts of suicide, compared with 13 percent of the general population.

I have searched the archives exhaustively and can’t find the paper. Does anyone know more about this?

Update: Boston.com blogger Rob Anderson at The Angle couldn’t find the study either, but he did find other interesting research on cops and depression. Data suggests suicide rates are higher among police officers than the rest of the population, but that hypothesis is not conclusive.