Trooper turned wellness manager teams with UNLV to support mental health within NSP ranks

Kendra Still’s career as a Nevada state trooper unexpectedly ended after 14 years when she was injured in a crash with a wrong-way driver on the 215 Beltway.

Herniated discs in her neck and a traumatic brain injury forced her to take medical retirement.

About a week into her abrupt retirement, and still trying to process what had happened, she was awakened by her husband’s phone ringing on the night of Oct. 1, 2017.

A lieutenant with Nevada State Police, he raced out of the house to respond to the deadliest shooting in modern American history along with Still’s former colleagues. A shooter on the Strip immediately killed 58 that night and injured hundreds of others.

While she was with the agency she could listen to the department’s radio to hear her husband’s voice during the graveyard shift. Instead, her home was filled with silence.

“I was feeling hopeless. I was feeling frustrated because I couldn’t get out there,” Still said. “Of course, when you sit in silence, your mind is your worst enemy.”

After a neurologist told her that she needed to read books aloud to heal her brain, Still knew she wanted to go back to school. The shooting, and its impact on her husband, gave her the reason why.

“We’re told and taught in the academy how to take care of everybody else, but we’re never taught how to take care of ourselves,” she said. “So that became my mission.”

Still, now the Nevada Department of Public Safety’s wellness program manager, is helping institute a new resiliency training program designed for the highway patrol. The first session of the program, developed by UNLV’s Tourist Safety Institute at the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, was hosted Wednesday by UNLV professors Steven Pace and Nicholas Barr.

The eight-week course, free for emergency responders, focuses on three pillars: mindfulness, emotional regulation and interpersonal skills.

The training can help troopers improve their sleep and personal relationships while also lowering blood-pressure and the symptoms of occupational burnout, according to the program’s website. UNLV’s team also hopes it can improve interactions between troopers and Clark County’s residents and tourists.

“It’s kind of ironic because from my office window, I can see UNLV’s campus, and it’s one of those things that you never even thought to reach out,” said Kevin Honea, deputy chief of highway patrol’s southern command. “The more we talked to the folks at UNLV, we went, ‘Oh man, that’s exactly what we’re trying to offer for our people.”

Mindfulness training includes asking participants to slowly deepen their breathing with their eyes closed or softened toward the floor. When thoughts inevitably break the silence, Barr asks participants to, without pushing them away, gently return their mind back to their breathing.

“There’s a lot of demand on troopers to manage all those various inputs in the course of their job responsibilities,” Barr said. “Mindfulness can help to regulate attention, to select appropriately which of those to really focus on or act on in a moment.”

Joel Lieberman, a professor in UNLV’s department of criminal justice who also worked on the program, said there were misconceptions that mindfulness would merely mellow out whoever utilizes it. Instead, Lieberman said mindfulness was more about improving attention and managing emotions, adding that professional athletes use the skill in their training.

As soon as troopers get in their patrol car, Still said their stress levels go up, constantly scanning for possible threats to themselves and others around them. Once troopers are home, it can take 24 hours to return to a baseline, she said.

“Well, most of us have eight hours, maybe 12 hours, before we have to start again. So, we never really return back to baseline,” Still said. “With the resiliency program with UNLV, it will help our guys and girls get back down to level a lot quicker.

While Honea said there was excitement from officers about the training, that eagerness hasn’t always been there.

“It used to be, ‘This is what you signed up for. Rub some dirt on it and get back in the game,’ ” Honea said. “It’s more accepted now, and we’ve got a very safe environment here. There’s not one person here that Kendra and I haven’t cried with, haven’t laughed with.”

Still added that a difficult end of 2023 for the patrol raised awareness that it was OK to ask for help.

On Nov. 30, a car driven by an impaired driver struck and killed Sgt. Michael Abbate and Trooper Alberto Felix while they were aiding another driver on the side of Interstate 15 in Las Vegas. Still had only started working as the Department of Public Safety’s wellness program manager weeks earlier.

“We brought clinicians in and we had dispatchers come in. We had every shift come in and talk to their people,” Honea said. “We had one that was just with management and leadership. We had, one evening, (a) two-hour session for the spouses of anybody in this building who was living through it.”

Honea defined the new program’s success in the future outcomes for his officers. He wants to come back 20 years from now to a retirement ceremony to see his current troopers with healthy relationships, bodies and minds. He wants to see people currently working at the southern command thrive, not just survive.

Still defined her vision in the present.

“When I can take those officers and those troopers and they walk into this building knowing that if they ever need help, they will not go without,” Still said. “That’s how I measure my success.”

[email protected] / 702-990-8923 / @Kyle_Chouinard