LAPD Adds 2 Psychologists to Aid Officers : Police: City Council approves hirings, prompted by a sharp rise in demand for job-related stress counseling. Heavier workload is also linked to the shutdown of union’s therapy program.

A sharp increase in demand by Los Angeles police for psychological counseling has led the Police Department to hire two additional psychologists to assist officers afflicted by job-related stress.

The Los Angeles City Council on Friday agreed to hire the psychologists, bringing the counseling staff to nine, after receiving a report that LAPD therapists conducted twice as many therapy sessions in 1993 as they did three years earlier and handled nearly four times as many suicide threats by officers.

The increasing workload for the Police Department’s Behavioral Science Services Section is partly a result of a reported increase in stress among officers, but also to the shutdown more than two years ago of the Police Protective League’s psychological counseling program.

Officials said the Police Department’s expanded psychological staff also will be needed to cope with the increasing number of officers who will join the force as Mayor Richard Riordan and Police Chief Willie L. Williams continue with their five-year plan to beef up the Police Department.

“Police officers feel they are going out every day and putting their lives on the line, getting shot at and stabbed and then seeing themselves criticized when they go home and watch the evening news,” said Debra Glaser, acting chief of the police psychological unit.

Glaser said police work has always been stressful, with higher rates of alcoholism and divorce than in the general population. But she and others in the department said they have noticed a striking increase in a sort of blue- Angst since the beating of Rodney G. King more than three years ago. The deluge of criticism after the incident, and the subsequent conviction of two officers, alienated many police, she said.

Many officers feel that the pressure and anxiety on the job has been nearly relentless ever since, heightened by a triad of disasters--the riots, wildfires and earthquake, said Fred Tredy, a director with the police union. Police have been further disillusioned, he said, because they have gone without a pay raise or a contract during roughly the same period.

The feeling of isolation for officers was exacerbated in late 1991, when the police union’s counseling program was disbanded after the city pulled $300,000 in funding.

City executives and the union said they hope that the program will be revived as a part of ongoing contract negotiations. But in the meantime, it is believed that many of the 1,000 officers a year who had used the union program have turned to the in-house Behavioral Science Services Section.

Still, even if all those officers had shifted from the union’s program to the department’s, they would only account for a portion of the surge in requests for counseling.

The Police Department had requested the addition of five psychologists, as well as action to fill a vacancy for an executive to head the unit. The City Council agreed to hire the two psychologists--who will make $58,000 a year--and city officials said they will track the unit’s workload and consider adding more therapists later.

The counseling unit was the first of its kind when it was founded 23 years ago by psychologist Martin Reiser. It occupies a suite of offices in a Chinatown bank building.

Therapists conducted 1,834 counseling sessions in 1990, a figure that had jumped to 3,700 by 1993, according to a report from the city administrative officer. The number of emergency calls, ranging from officers involved in shootings to those who witnessed traumatic events such as suicides, jumped from 75 in 1991 to 160 last year. The number of calls from officers contemplating suicide jumped from 14 to 60 annually over the same period.

Actual suicides by officers and police retirees have held fairly steady over the last decade, with a total of 15 suicides during that time, a Police Department spokeswoman said. The most in any year was five suicides in 1991.

“Before, we never had to keep statistics on suicides,” Glaser said. “Now we get calls like that all the time.”