La capacité de mentalisation du fonctionnaire de police et coping des facteurs traumatiques dans son vécu

Abstract

The title of this study is “the police officer’s ability to mentalize and coping with inductive traumatic factors in his or her experience”. In the context of the Cameroonian police, which does not use psychological assessments during recruitment and competitive examinations, it is necessary to take psychopathological factors into account. The ability to mentalize appears to be a relevant factor in understanding the traumatic experience of some police officers. The problem that arises and must be analyzed throughout this work is that of the discrepancy between the mentalization capacities of the Police Officer supposedly acquired during police training and the coping of traumatic factors in his experience. Thus, we asked ourselves the question "What relationship is there between the processes of mentalization and the coping of psychic traumas in police officers? ". Based on the cognitive approach of Beck (1963), Young (1995) and Ellis (1962) we formulated the following hypothesis "The mentalization processes have an impact on the coping of psychotraumas". The objective is to broadly understand the process of mentalization and to see how this activity can be used in the development of coping. To achieve this objective, we used the clinical method, in particular the case study. The data was collected using semi-structured interviews with two subjects from the Cameroonian police. The interview content analysis technique focused on identifying significant themes was used to analyze the results. These results, interpreted mainly from the angle of the cognitive approach, show that mentalization acts as an amplifier of cognitive biases in the traumatic experience of our participants. Inappropriate cognitive patterns, irrational beliefs and cognitive distortions maintained by mentalization are these cognitive biases that contribute to poor coping during the traumatic experience of subjects returning from the front. The results of this study therefore give clinical relevance to our initial hypothesis.