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.

What Firefighters and Medicine Teach Us About Mental Resilience

In 1949, fifteen elite smokejumpers leaped into the Montana wilderness to confront what appeared to be a routine forest fire. Within hours, thirteen of them were dead. The Mann Gulch disaster has since become the definitive case study for how high-performing teams collapse under extreme pressure. It was not a lack of fitness or training that killed these men; it was a breakdown in sensemaking. When their commander, Wag Dodge, realized the fire had turned and ordered his men to drop their heavy tools and lie down in a patch of grass he had intentionally set ablaze – an “escape fire” – the team failed to recognise his genius. Tethered to their training and unable to make sense of an unprecedented command, they ran uphill, tools in hand, and were overtaken by the flames.

Today, Dr. Paul Barach – a physician, former military officer, and global expert in patient safety – uses the haunting legacy of Mann Gulch to challenge our modern understanding of mental resilience. With a career spanning emergency medicine, anesthesiology and health systems reform across four continents, Barach argues that the “heroic-individual” model of medicine and emergency response is not only outdated but dangerous.

Nordic Wellbeing Academy had the pleasure to chat with Barach in relation to the MentaStress project. 

Microsystems – not individuals

Barach’s central argument is blunt: resilience has very little to do with the individual if the team doesn’t support them. “The unit of performance is not the individual. The unit of performance is the clinical microsystem.”

This insight came from five years in the military, where everything he had learned in medical school was challenged. He was trained in martial arts not for violence, but to learn that even after taking a punch, you continue to do what you have to do. He went on solo navigations for dozens of miles in uncertain terrain to practise being comfortable with not knowing. Working alongside special performance teams, he concluded that the heroic-individual model that medical training had given him was simply the wrong and unsustainable model.

“Resilience has very little to do with the individual if there’s no team that supports you.”

For volunteer emergency organisations, this reframing is fundamental. A volunteer fire crew, a civil protection unit, a search and rescue team – none of these can function as a collection of individually resilient people. The resilience either lives in the team or it doesn’t exist.

Sensemaking – a skill few teach

Karl Weick, an organisational theorist, analyses the Mann Gulch disaster in 1993. According to him, the 13 smoke jumpers lacked sensemaking: the capacity to construct enough understanding of an unfolding situation to take the next step. The question Barach puts to trainees is not “what is happening?” but “do I have enough to move to the next point of uncertainty?” Waiting for certainty before acting is not caution; in dynamic environments, it is paralysis.

“He used it as a metaphor for organism – for how to survive by changing the environment around you, not just responding to it.”

The Mann Gulch commander’s escape fire was an act of applied sensemaking under extreme pressure: he changed the terms of the problem rather than trying to solve the original problem with insufficient resources. The lesson for volunteer organisations is not to train only for expected scenarios, but to always train for the routine moments when the scenario stops making sense.

Uncertainty is a resource, not a threat

A great and initially counterintuitive point from Barach is that certainty is more dangerous than uncertainty. “Certainty is very comforting, but it’s a great danger: it offers an artificial construct of security.” When practitioners feel certain, they stop scanning. They stop adapting. They stop being afraid. They miss the signals that the situation has changed.

For volunteer emergency organisations, this has direct training implications. Programmes focused exclusively on correct procedures for expected scenarios may be producing practitioners who are capable in familiar situations and brittle in unfamiliar ones. What Barach advocates for is explicit training in the unexpected – through simulation, role-playing and scenario variation – so that not knowing what to do next becomes itself a practised, navigable state.

“Mike Tyson says everybody has a plan until they’re punched in the face. Resilience is agility – a willingness to accept that there are multiple ways to reach your solution.”

Learning by design, not by chance

Barach has spent more than two decades designing structured learning moments for clinical and emergency settings. His conviction is simple: “I don’t believe in learning by chance. Learning happens when there is an explicit effort to codify the lesson, reflect on what it meant, and extract from it what’s meaningful for future encounters.”

Structured debriefing is central – but not as mere incident review. What Barach is after is what he calls “good emotional residue”: a debrief that leaves practitioners with a sense of having been seen and supported in processing what happened. This includes self-forgiveness. The “second victim” phenomenon – the responder traumatised by their own involvement in an adverse event – is real, lasting, and systematically under-addressed, leading to much burnout, broken spirited healthcare providers and turnover in emergency services. For organisations operating with limited time and resources, his advice is to start small and make it structural: even a brief, well-designed check-in after each significant call, led by a leader who models vulnerability, begins to build the reflective culture that complex emergency work requires. He advises: “Lean into near misses and near failures as they offer deep knowledge about system complexity.”

The Lesson That Took Thirty Years

Between the Mann Gulch disaster and Weick’s analysis over 40 years passed. The escape fire technique is now standard worldwide enabled by years of institutional learning. Barach finds this story both hopeful (because learning does happen) and troubling (because the pace may not be adequate for the complexity of the crises we face). However, he highlights that the pace can be accelerated through explicit, structurally embedded and deep learning processes, not through hope nor individual heroism. 

“These things are shaped,” he says. “You have to shape them deliberately.” That, perhaps, is the deepest lesson from Mann Gulch: Dodge, the commander’s escape fire was genius in the moment. The work of resilience is turning individual genius into collective knowledge – before the next fire arrives.

Further Reading

Karl Weick (1996)  “Prepare Your Organization to Fight Fires” – Harvard Business Review.

Norman Maclean (1992)  Young Men and Fire – The definitive account of the Man Gulch disaster.

U.S. Fire Administration  Man Gulch analysis and policy lessons – how the disaster became standard procedure.

Firefighter Nation  “Sensemaking and Its Effect on Firefighter and Fire Officer Decisions.”

Weick (1993)  “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster” – JSTOR.

Barach P, Phelps G. Clinical sensemaking: a systematic approach to reduce the impact of normalised deviance in the medical profession. J R Soc Med. 2013 Oct;106(10):387-90. doi: 10.1177/0141076813505045. PMID: 24097963; PMCID: PMC3791099.

Mohr JJ, Barach P, Cravero JP, Blike GT, Godfrey MM, Batalden PB, Nelson EC. Microsystems in health care: Part 6. Designing patient safety into the microsystem. Jt Comm J Qual Saf. 2003 Aug;29(8):401-8. doi: 10.1016/s1549-3741(03)29048-1. PMID: 12953604.

How the UK police force is transforming mental health support for its officers

Policing is a profession that demands not only physical strength but also immense mental resilience. Over the past two decades, the demands on police officers have changed tremendously and so has the conversation around mental health in policing. 

To understand this shift, Nordic Wellbeing Academy spoke with Professor John Harrison, National Police Chief Medical Officer for England and Wales. His work has been pivotal in shifting the culture from one of silence and stigma to one of openness and support and how mental resilience is being prioritised in modern policing. 

The Challenges: Stigma, Culture, and Evolving Demands

Historically, policing has been dominated by a “macho culture”, where emotional vulnerability is often seen as weakness. Officers relied on coping mechanisms like dark humor, alcohol, or simply bottling up their feelings. As John notes: “Police and fire services have quasi-militaristic structures with macho cultures that historically ignored emotional feelings.”

This culture created a significant stigma around mental health, leaving many officers feeling isolated. The problem was compounded by the fact that policing itself has evolved dramatically. Where officers once dealt primarily with traditional crimes, they now face complex issues like domestic abuse, sexual violence and online paedophilia – all of which carry a heavy psychological burden.

Another challenge is the lack of experience among newer officers. John points out that around 25% of officers today have less than five years of service, meaning they often lack the maturity and coping skills to handle the traumas they encounter.

Building Resilience: From Individual to Organisational Support

John explains, “Peer support networks allow officers to speak with colleagues who understand their experiences. This creates a sense of camaraderie and trust, which is essential for breaking down barriers to seeking help.”

Additionally, external networks of trauma therapists have been established to provide specialised care, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). These therapies are designed to help officers process trauma and build resilience.

While individual resilience is critical, John emphasises that organisational resilience is equally important. This means creating a work environment that supports mental wellbeing through policies, training, and leadership. He states, “We’re shifting from focusing solely on individual resilience to building organisational resilience. This involves training managers to recognise signs of stress in their teams and fostering a culture where wellbeing is prioritised.”

Increasingly, data analytics play a crucial role, too. By tracking metrics like sickness absence, burnout rates, and presenteeism, the police force can identify trends and tailor their support programmes more effectively.

The Future of Mental Health in Policing

As John puts it: “We’re trying to embed the concept of wellbeing in our workforces, with leadership from everybody in policing from a wellbeing perspective.”The goal is to create a culture where mental health is not just discussed but actively supported – where officers feel empowered to seek help without fear of judgment. With continued effort, collaboration, and investment, the future of policing can be one where resilience and wellbeing are at the heart of the profession. For now, the message is simple: mental health matters, and in policing, it’s not just a personal issue – it’s an operational necessity.

The International Society for Emotion-Focused Therapy is a vibrant community of researchers, educators, coaches, trainers, and – of course – therapists.

The ISEFT 2025 conference in Bucharest was therefore a wonderful mix of practice, theory, exploration, and dialogue. NWA had the pleasure of both presenting our MentaStress project in a session on how to use Erasmus+ for knowledge sharing in EFT – and also conduct a workshop to develop new HR guidelines that integrates an emotional health literate approach to help integration of vulnerable groups – so amazing input for our ISRICM project also.

You can find a copy of the workshop report here. Or join our upcoming webinar September 4, 14 CET to contribute (stay tuned or send us a mail to get direct invite).

The ambitions of the JA PreventNCD project are huge; Finally being able to significantly build the policy frameworks and services that can fundamentally and radically reduce the impact of NCDs in Europe.  As part of these ambitions, the project is building the EU Consortium on NCD Prevention to act as a continuous, ambitious, and cross-sector advisory body for future public health policies in EU.

Recognizing the challenge for maintaining the long term focus on NCDs in a modern political landscape, the intent is to build a body of experts, institutions, and organisations that can help cover this gap. Following the first great meeting in Brussels last year, June 17-18 Lars Münter participated in the EU Polish Presidency event in Katowice to allow NWA help in the co-creation process among the partners – this was a rich experience of both exploring futures, using process design and thinking, and introducing a number of creative steps to support and increase the ideation during the workshops. Read more about the event here.

The goal is (initially) to build a framework of a future-fit structure for the Consortium that ensures trust, inclusion, impact, and sustainability. And of course to also lead to a powerful energy that can lead Europeans toward better health and EU towards a significantly reduced risk and burden from this challenge.

EuroHealthNet is a key European connector of public health actors, innovators, researchers, and entrepreneurs. The annual seminar is a highlight of knowledge sharing for institutions across Europe in their efforts to promote best practices, build future policies, and to navigate shifting political landscapes.

The annual seminar 2025 focused on the impact of climate change on health and health systems. Clearly the many detrimental effects of climate change on animals, oceans, and nature is well known, but the ripple effects on both specific health conditions and by extension of the health systems built to alleviate them is less obvious yet – but the price in human suffering, money, and time is extremely high already and only growing. Read more about the seminar and programme here.

So it was very timely – albeit not exactly encouraging – for NWA to participate in the annual seminar. And very happy for us also to now get the official proof of membership also!

There is a huge potential in exploring the many ways art and artistic practices can be used to create awareness about mental health, support resilience, extend emotional health literacy, treat or reduce symptoms, or be a great bridge in the process towards rehabilitation. NWA once again participated with great enthusiasm in the inspiring Arts & Mental Health Festival on Aegina, Greece.

Organized by the Greek organisation for informal carers EPIONI since 2022, the annual event has managed to gather a core international community of practitioners and innovators that are exploring and documenting these practices.

Lars Münter had the pleasure of delivering an opening speech, highlighting the amazing potential of creative practices not just for mental health, but also for improving knowledge sharing itself, for innovation, for leadership, and for general education too.

Nina Sønderberg also presented her new book “30 Days of Self-Love” at the event and the background and uses for these self-journaling tools for unlocking insights and progress for the user. NWA will further explore this in coming projects and initiatives (and look forward to report on them in Aegina in 2026!).

The Icelandic government has been a strong supporter of the principles of wellbeing economy for years. Their track record of public health innovation and holistic thinking is second to none. One of the key events and initiatives for this process has been the hosting of the annual Wellbeing Economy Forum in Reykjavik.

NWA participated in a lively and dedicated community of change makers working to implement wellbeing economy at national, regional, or local level – or for imbedding the mindset in research, investment programs, or other frameworks for societal progress.

We are really excited about the launch of a new project in NWA as part of the Social Innovation Initiative.

The project, “Innovative Solutions for Refugee Integration and Crisis Mitigation in EU Member States,” aims to address the humanitarian crisis caused by the war in Ukraine by facilitating the integration and social inclusion of refugees in EU Member States. The project runs from May 1, 2025 to April 30, 2026 and will achieve this through a multi-faceted approach that includes tailored vocational training, upskilling programs, and comprehensive support services for refugees.

In the project, NWA will focus on guidelines for integration of Ukrainians into European workplaces to support a wellbeing and prosperous future culture of integration.

The other participating organizations bring extensive expertise in social inclusion, a huge network of other European partners, and proven capacity in managing complex, multi-country projects. By leveraging social innovation and promoting collaboration among EU member states, the project seeks to build more resilient and inclusive societies.

The project will empower refugees by providing them with the necessary skills and support to rebuild their lives, contribute to their host communities, and mitigate the consequences of the crisis on Member States’ societies and public services. Given NWA membership of the Network of European Social Entrepreneurs and Innovators, this is particularly interesting to also scale and transfer for other countries and settings.

Looking the the future was the task at the HRH Symposium in Copenhagen April 28-30 at WHO Europe HQ in Copenhagen. NWA co-founder Lars Münter was invited to join both plenary panel, facilitate workshop on potential use of AI to reduce HCP burnout, and be a panelist in a breakout session. This combined presentation of our work with both the Nordic Health 2030 Movement, the Danish Life Science Cluster, the Strategic Partners Initiative on Data and Digital Health, the European Health Futures Forum, and also elements of the new MyHealth@MyHands Projec. In short – this was a great conference to understand mindsets and models.

The experience and the conference had a great energy building on a strong recognition of the need to transform the current method in new practices that benefits patients, staff, planet, and plans much better. Getting to that transformation is the tricky part.

Read more about the conference and find presentations here.