Staying human under pressure – a meaningful challenge and growth for a Greek volunteer firefighter

There is a moment Eleanna Malliou returns to when asked about mental resilience. She is in a fire truck moving through a crowd of families who have been told to leave their homes. A wildfire is burning somewhere above them in the mountain. The people standing on either side of the road don’t know yet whether their houses will be there when it ends.

“When we passed through, I saw the kids, the families – you could see very anxious people, people who looked more relaxed but you knew inside they were not,” she says. “There are people who don’t know if in two hours their home will still be there. And I’m going to help them – but that sank my heart.”

What she describes is not quite fear and not quite sadness. It is something more precise: the emotional weight of being the person driving toward the thing everyone else is running from, while being close enough to feel exactly what that costs them. “I felt nice that I was helping,” she says. “But I felt bad because of the feelings they would be experiencing at that point.”

This double sensation – the pull of purpose against the weight of what you witness – is perhaps the most honest description of what mental resilience actually feels like from the inside. Not toughness. Not detachment. A bridge, as she puts it, between helping and feeling bad.

Eleanna Malliou (front row, second from right) is a volunteer firefighter and member of OEDD: the Volunteer Forest Firefighters and Rescuers of Ekali, a community-based team founded in 2000 in the Ekali suburb north of Athens, currently participating in the MentaStress project.

Personality, preparation, and knowing your gaps

Eleanna is candid that resilience is not the same for everyone. It starts with personality. “Someone who is really sensitive would get more impacted by going to incidents with bad things happening,” she says. She counts herself among the sensitive ones – and then describes, without any contradiction, how she has managed to function effectively anyway.

Her answer is preparation. “What always helps me feel that I’ll react more okay is getting as much knowledge as I can – so when I get there, I know how to help.” The logic is straightforward: anxiety is sharpest when you don’t know what to do. Training doesn’t eliminate the emotional charge of an incident; it keeps the not-knowing from overwhelming you on top of it. “Of course, I’m touched by the fact that someone got hurt – but I also get a nice feeling, because I go help them. I take some of the bad thoughts out and I’m like: I was there, I helped, I did everything I could.”

She is also honest about limits. “I have no idea how I’m going to react if I eventually go to a person who has passed. No one knows how they will react until they face it.” What she has instead of certainty is a team. She describes knowing that colleagues with more experience can cover her gaps – and knowing that if she needs to, she can step back to the truck, sit down, and give herself time to come back to herself. 

A culture still learning to talk mental health

As an organisation, OEDD was born some 25 years ago. Debriefing – the vital, structured conversation after an incident – actually came later. So for the early years of the team’s existence, it simply wasn’t there. Is it not a given in any culture.

And when Eleanna is asked what single practice she would recommend to any volunteer fire team that didn’t yet have it, she doesn’t hesitate: “Debriefing. I know I’ve been repeating myself, but I feel it’s a really important step.” The reason she gives is precise: “You may think you did something wrong when you eventually didn’t. Or you heard the story from only your perspective. If you don’t hear it from everyone, your thoughts just go around.”

She recalls a group of colleagues who came back from a wildfire that turned on them – the kind where the fire reverses direction without warning. “They had a huge debrief. It was three hours long, which is a long one.” They all came out better. She saw it with her own eyes.

“It’s still kind of a taboo thing. Some people, it’s their ego going in front. But we always know that if we need to talk to someone, there’s someone there – without judging us.”

Mental health in firefighting, she acknowledges, remains largely a taboo. Direct conversations 

about psychological strain are still rare. What her team does have is something quieter: the knowledge that if you need to talk to someone, someone will be there, without judgement. She hopes the MentaStress project shifts this further – while being realistic that not everyone will put their ego down. Some, she thinks, will engage with the material quietly and alone, at home, when no one is watching.

Breathing through it: the 5-3-2-1 method

Among the tools the MentaStress project has introduced to her team, two stand out for Eleanna: a breathing exercise and the 5-3-2-1 grounding method. Both matter, she says, because they are doable – practical enough to use in real conditions, including sitting in a fire truck on the way back from a wildfire. “Having a few exercises in your head – breathe in, breathe out, relax – maybe after a very intense thing, you can sit in the truck while moving back and calm yourself down.” 

The 5-3-2-1 method – a grounding tool that uses the five senses to anchor attention back to the present moment – proved its value beyond the fire station when Eleanna’s flatmate, who struggled with anxiety, turned out to already be using it. “She said the 5-3-2-1 method, I use it a lot to calm myself down. That’s when I realised – these are not only things to keep in the fire station. You may find yourself in a very stressful situation anywhere. It’s good to know how to bring yourself back to normal.”

A message to young Europeans

Eleanna is one of the younger firefighters in her team, and one of relatively few women. When asked what she would say to other young Europeans considering volunteer firefighting, she doesn’t reach for recruitment language. She reaches for something more honest.

“It for sure gives you personal growth. You grow up faster. You see the world more.” There is knowledge you gain that you would never have thought you needed, and that turns out to be useful in ways you couldn’t have predicted. Being part of an emergency response team changes how you move through ordinary life: she no longer drinks and drives. Not as a rule someone imposed on her, but because she has seen what happens when people do, and there is simply no “fine” in it anymore.

Her call to action is not dramatic; “If you find it at least a tiny bit interesting, go try it. You don’t lose anything. When the wrong moment comes, you will be more ready to face it than people who have no idea about fire safety.”

She pauses, then adds the other part: helping people feels good. When she goes to an incident and does everything she can, even when the outcome isn’t what she hoped, she carries something back: I was there. I helped. That, in the end, is also what resilience is built from.