Last update - 00:00 15/12/2006
Mental stress takes severe toll on forensic lab technicians
By Roni Singer-Heruti, Haaretz Correspondent
In spite of the medication he takes daily, Michael Hen continues to wash the floors of his home five times a day. The psychiatric treatment he is receiving has not stopped him from disinfecting every item in his house with bleach. Even though he is fully cognizant of his problem he still finds it difficult to let his children spend any time in the mall.
He left the police six months ago, and now stays home. He spent 17 years as a lab technician in the forensic lab of the Shfela District police. It appears that the best medicine for him was leaving the job.
Hen left the force after a medical evaluation committee diagnosed him as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. During the past three years, four other lab technicians also left their job, all for mental health reasons. This constitutes a third of the manpower at the forensic lab, which the police say is not unusual on a national level.
"It seems that we are at the peak of a wave of retirements," the head of forensic labs at police headquarters, Dr. Azi Tzadok, said on Thursday.
"The psychological problems that I am suffering from are the direct result of my work in the forensic lab," Hen says. "This is the sort of work where you meet the greatest atrocities. We were confronted with corpses from terrible murder cases, with horrible suicides, but the [terrorist] bombings did us all in. Collecting body parts on the scene, taking finger prints for hours from pulverized corpses of children, can simply not be described in words. You fall apart as a result," he says.
The job of a forensic lab technician is to collect physical evidence from the scene of a crime. They collect fingerprints and various samples of DNA. At a scene of a terror attack their job, among others things, is to identify the victims, and to collect the body parts.
The problems with Hen started six years ago, though he developed a high blood pressure problem even before then, and gradually realized he had difficulty eating meat.
"I had to make an effort in every meal to think of good things in order to make the horrible sights and smells go away," he recalls.
Then came his obsession with cleanliness. He started cleaning his shoes with bleach, when he got home from the scene of a crime, and gradually started to clean the house compulsively. He then found himself coming home in the middle of the day to clean and take showers, over and over.
These days, officials at the Defense Ministry are evaluating Hen's request to have his disability recognized. The other four lab technicians who left the force have already been recognized by the Defense Ministry as suffering from psychological disabilities.
Two more forensic lab technicians are currently in the process of leaving the force. Another colleague tried to commit suicide recently and his friends say this stems from the psychological pressure at work.
I joined the forensic lab force because I thought the work would be very interesting. No one prepared me for what really goes on out there, I had never seen a corpse before," D., one of the technicians that is stepping down said.
"I remember one time, when we went out to a relatively simple murder case. The body was not in a terrible state, but it was late and it was in the middle of a grove. We were two at the scene. Do you have any idea how scary it is to stand alone over a body at night in the middle of a field?" Hen asks.
The officers in the Central and Tel Aviv police districts suffer greater psychological stress because, some say, they work shifts at Abu Kabir, the central morgue where corpses are identified.
"There are no words to describe the scenes and the smells," D. said. "There is a difference between evacuating the body of a small child from the scene and cleaning his fingers of blood as the body is lying in the morgue in order to take fingerprints so we can figure out who he is," D. said.