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26 October 2026 · Denmark 1
We’ve added Jan’s story here. We believe the PTSD connect on this site will be of use to all. Please read
Results from a danish study about mental health of…
20 October 2026 · Belgium 2 · Flandern, Belgium
ATTENTION! ATTENION! the Promovideo of the Belgium…
26 October 2026 · Denmark 1
We’ve added Jan’s story here. We believe the PTSD connect on this site will be of use to all. Please read
Results from a danish study about mental health of firefighters and EMT Post traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, appear as a psychological reaction on a external strong stressful, life threatening or frightening experience. The perception of the experience is often different from person to person, it depends on the individual mental state, health, surroundings and many other factors. It normal to have reaktions due to the incident in the days or weeks after, but can be delayed for years. For veterans its in average 16 years delayed. Facts of the study on firefighters and EMT: ⁃ 7-8% fulfill the criteria for a PTSD-diagnosis ⁃ 17-22% is in highrisk of getting PTSD ⁃ Firefighters experience 3-4 traumatic incidents a year, EMT often way more ⁃ PTSD can show years later, in some cases 40 years later President Denmark 1, Jan Winther’s take on this: The number are the known cases, but the dark unknown number can be twice as high. As vicepresident of the Danish firefighter cancer organization, BFC, I get a lot of questions about this. I, myself, have PTSD and try to guide to getting people the right help and get the traumas acknowledged as a work related incident. The problem is to prove this. Like with cancer issues, brain damage due to carbon monoxide exposure, BFC fights for a assumption legislation for PTSD in Denmark. It’s a hard fight, but we will get there. Why do you get PTSD? If your brain tells you, you’re in life threatening danger, well, then you are. No matter how others see the situation, you feel in danger, that can give you a trauma. Many small traumas, can accumulate and end up as PTSD. Situations were you feel unequipped, not prepared, unsafe, not protected, not backed up, and many many more things can accumulate to a servere trauma. Your interpretation of the situation, is the main factor. You can train your hole life for all kinds of situations, but as you all know, everyone can be caught of garde. It can happen to all, no matter how prepared, tuff and hardcore you think you are. Studies of soldiers with PTSD have showed, that up to 40%, said that bad and incompetent leadership was a big factor of the traumas. My guess is that its the same in the fireservice. That’s kind of scary, because this trauma comes from the people you should be able to trust. My own case: In 1994, I was a handsome young sergentmajor, in the danish civilian defence, like FEMA or the German THW. State owned heavy rescue service. I was asked to go to the current war in former Yugoslavia in the Balkans. The war started in 1988, 2 years after the dictator Tito died. His iron grip on the population, held 3 religions together as neighbors. Now everyone was fighting against each other. I will not get into who, I think, was the bad guys down there, but I can say, we meet aggressors and nice people from all sides. My job was to be a leader on a food aid convoy-team. Together with an local interpeter, running point, guiding the truck to the destinations and keeping everyone alive and safe. A year before we lost 2 drivers, many others heavily injured, in a tank attack, in a tunnel in Maglaj. A driver, from Danish refugee council, got killed by sniper fire near Jayce, and a colleague of mine got a mortar grenade dropped on his car, killing his interpeter and blowing my colleague to pieces. His survived the attack though. We got ready to go, wrote our “Last will” - papers and went down there. Based in a civilian housing area in Zagreb, we drove all over the north side of the area. Daily crossings of checkpoints, with different military control. Our vehicles was normal trucks, Mercedes 911, and a Toyota landcruiser for me as leader of the team. No armor, just a ballistic helmet and vest. As aid organization we were unarmed, except a pocket knife. We saw a lot of bad shit there, driving all over the place. Bodies laying where they were shot down, ethnics cleansing, blown up buildings, bodies stacked up or floating in rivers. Artillery and sniper fire over our heads, held up on gunpoint numres of times, a truck lost it steering and drove in to a mine field, intimidations and threats to give up our load of aids. Once we were followed by a Flying Fortress Helicopter, Russian model, hoovering behind us, for what i thought was an half hour, but later found out was about 5-6 minutes, enough time to scare the shit out of all of us. One push at the trigger and we would be slaughtered. The only people that was happy to see us was the once getting the food aid. A lot of shit to deal with. I could go on, but I think you get the picture. When we all got back home, we had two days off and then back to our normal jobs, no debriefing, no help. My friends, family and colleagues said I was changed, when I came back, but none talked about it. I kept everything inside my head, no need to bother others about the things I was dealing with. And absolutely no acceptens from my side, that something wasn’t right. Over the years after, I was short fused, angry, feeling alone with my thoughts, constant nightmares, bad sleep, a feeling of being targeted every time I was outside, looking snipers everywhere, open areas and crowded places was a big NO THANKS, didn’t like to walk the lawn because of mines, easy to start crying when I was alone, constant on my toes and seeking secure areas, but never feeling safe. In the later years I got a little better to act “normal” around other people, trying to be a regular person, acting happy and care free. I was better at acting than i thought, keeping it up for 3 decades. Everything was good, on the outside. 30 years later, I’m a firefighter in Copenhagen Airport. On a day, two days before our team left for vacation, our team had a rutine exercise with our crash tenders. The goal was to train with the Compressed air foam system, CAFS, first with hoses and later with the roof water canon. A system were you add compressed air, reduced to 22-25 bars pressure, to the already mixed water-foam extinguish system. The CAFS, has a 6 x 200 liter bottle, 300 bars, supply system. That’s a LOT of air. That day my job was to drive the crash tender and on site work the pump and CAFS system. The first team, at the nozzle, gave me a thumps up, they were ready. I pushed all the right buttons and the engine started its job. When I turned on the CAFS, a default in the pressure system, made 300 bars of compressed air join the system, without the reduction of the pressure to the normal 25 bars. Within a few seconds, a security valve, reacted and led the pressure to a outlet underneath the crash tender, 1 meter form where I was standing. I reacted, something was wrong, I turned everything off, jumped in to the truck and turned off the engines. I was sitting in the drivers seat, and replaying the hole thing in my head. I was sure, this was my mistake. I didn’t wanted to look out the window, I was convinced I killed the hole team. I was scared of the scene of dead and heavily injured colleges in front of the truck. Did I make a mistake and killed everyone?? I then realized I couldn’t hear anything, I was deaf from the blowout. Rewinding 10 seconds. When the unreduced high pressured water-foam solution, left the pump, into the hose, a lot of things happened almost at once. The guys holding the nozzle, got thrown to the ground, breaking 3 ribs, when the nozzle impacted with his chest. The hose gets thrown around and hits another colleague on the knee, with a bad injury to the kneecap. Grabble and small rocks gets sent out everywhere. A rock hit a colleague in the head, rips his chin and break of two of his teeth. The hose, tested for 80 bars of pressure, splits open a hole 3 meters long, sending water-foam all over the area. No one died, a lot of small tears and everyone looking like white garden gnomes covered in foam. Everyone looking at each other with a “WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED…????!!!”- look on their faces. The security valve has blown a 1 square meter, 20 centimeter deep, hole in the asphalt underneath the truck. Half of the air in the supply bottles is gone, 180.000 liters of air in a few seconds. I convince myself that I have to take a look outside the truck. I see my colleagues slowly getting of the ground, checking them selfs and the others for injuries, starting talking and when everyone is on their feet, still shocked, of cause starting laughing by the look of the other white garden gnomes. No panic, just another day in the firedepartment. But in my head, everything collapses. I sit on the ground crying. My hearing slowly returns. Suddenly all my colleagues gather around me, insuring me that all survived and it wasn’t my fault. I slowly get back to the real world outside my head and gets a grip of my self. We had debriefing afterwards. I was offered psychological assistance, but the “NO, I’M FINE”- acting came back to me. Other than my fucked up brain, my only other injury was tinnitus, still there to remind me of that day. Our mechanics investigated the incident and they found the default in the valves, and the security valve was stuck at first, due to lack of service. They changed the hole security system afterwards. We now had proof that it wasn’t my fault. I kept up the acting “normal” for one more year, until we had a simuler exercise… That day I was on the nozzle-team. Business as usual. Until the pump started roaring. I got tunnel vision, my brain fucked up, I wanted to run, run fast away from it all. I finished the exercise still trying to act normal, but something changed. I couldn’t shake it off anymore. I was scared. Scared of myself, my first reaction. From that day, the downward spiral started, going REALLY fast down. I was at home, sick, after seeing the Doctor in the fireservice, shock, stress and depression, he said. The diagnosis didn’t make sense to me, I was a firefighter, tuff and hardcore, I could walk on water if I wanted to. How the fuck did that change, to being a whining sissy, crying my eyes out when I was alone?? I was send to a psychiatrist. Not that I thought it would make a difference, in fact I was against it. But my wife on the other hand, insisted for me to go. She had found me, when she came home from work, weeks in a row, sitting in my bathrobe, a cold cup of coffee staring at the television and having no idea what I was watching or where the last 8 hours had gone. My brain was spinning off, 10.000 thoughts at the same time, never getting any rest. Flashbacks from the war, soldiers in uniform with no faces, the incident in the fireservice, all the fear came back. The nightmares was devastating, covered in sweat, puls on a 160 bpm and the feeling that I had to escape, fleeing from my imaginary enemies in my head. At a point, thoughts about leaving this life, started coming up, in the back of my brain. My wife asked me how I was doing. After 15 minutes of silence, I had no answer to give. I accepted I needed help. Now, after 8 years of therapy, medication, talking, telling my story over and over until my friends ears bleeding and an early retirement due to servere PTSD, Im starting to get better. I have more good days than bad days. It’s been a hard, long struggle to get here, but I’m getting better. On the bad days, I sleep a lot, trying not to isolate myself, breathing and just staying alive. If you need movie suggestion on Netflix, just ask, I’ve seen it all. The good days, I have a little more energy to do something around the house. Drive on the bike, visiting friends, do my hobbies. My therapist told me, look at my energy usage as matches. Everyone wakes up with 10 new matches every day. “Normal” people use one match, to get out of bed, take a shower and leave for work. After work they might have 3-4 matches left, for sports, family and friends. I, on the other hand, use a match just to convince myself to get out of bed before I piss myself, a match for a shower and one for drinking coffee and getting ready for a brand new day. Before I’m ready to get up and do anything, I have used 3-5 matches. I might run out of matches before noon and that’s it, I’m done for the rest of the day. You can borrow matches from tomorrow, but then you only wake up with less matches the next day. When I go to big family gatherings, parties, a concert, everything that makes my head going in security mode, making me alert on my surroundings, I use extra matches. Matches borrowed from the day after. I know this and plan for it. Often I have to plan for 2 days, with no activity at all, when I get home. Just to get my full set of matches back. When I go with you guys, my Red Knight Family, I get a burst of energy, felling safe and happy. Good people, laughs and parties. The matches are burning slow. I love it. I think I use less matches, when I’m with this family, because as firefighters everyone is aware of the surroundings, ready to step in. I’m not doing the job alone and Im able to relax and enjoy. And very important, I come home and have fun stories to tell. My wish for you all, and what I had to learn the hard way, is to be aware of each other, talk about the funny stuff BUT also the hard stuff. No more taboos on how you are doing. Get it out in the open and you will see you’re not alone with all this. If you see someone struggling, put out a hand, a shoulder to cry on or what ever is needed. We are trained as firefighters, to help people on the worst day of their lifes, taking care of others, but who’s taking care of us? If you are struggling don’t hesitate to reach out, the help is only a phone call away. And remember, the world is a better place with you in it! If you want help or advice I’m always here to help, feel free to contact me. PS. I hope reading this didn’t use too many of YOUR matches in the daily matchbox. I’ll probably take a few days to recover some matches, burned from writing this. Loyal to our duty Jan Winther President Red Knights MC DK1
