Even with the best of resources, the job of a police officer is highly stressful. They deal with the most difficult of human circumstances – and often the most dangerous, too.

You would hope that police forces would be mindful of this and would ensure that the mental health of officers was properly looked after. However, research carried out by the Liberal Democrats show that 1.4 million days of police time were lost in the last three years due to mental ill health of both officers and community support officers.

This is worrying both in terms of the impact on the individual officers and on the effectiveness of the force.

Lib Dem Peer Brian Paddick has called for the government to take action to boost the mental health of police officers:

The figures show that mental ill health is widespread among the police service. Frontline officers deal with relentless trauma over years. This issue hasn’t been adequately addressed so far and the government must look at how they address this.

There is a stigma that is deeply embedded in the culture of the police service and it is now time to break it.

Many officers both serving and retired who deal with mental ill health want to be diagnosed and treated more quickly.

Part of the problem is that mental health is not as adequately resourced as it should be throughout the NHS, meaning that it is very difficult for many people to get the treatment they need quickly.

ITV covered this and conducted a hard-hitting interview with an officer who suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He describes how the stigma within the force is as bad as the illness itself.

The information was found by the Liberal Democrats making freedom of information requests to many police forces across Britain. That’s an incredible amount of work for a small team of people, so well done to them for putting the effort in. It’s so good to see something that includes Scotland as well as England and Wales, too.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings