Mental health is the single biggest cause of Met Police absence days, new figures from the MPS have revealed.
Out of a recorded 478,455 total sickness days over the last year, 31% of all absences were linked to mental health and psychological conditions – this is significantly higher than any other stand alone illness category.
This comes after the Metropolitan Police Federation reported last year that a record 2,000 Met Police officers had signed off for mental health issues, with many staff citing stress, depression and PTSD as key factors.
Recorded as ‘mental illness-other’ and ‘psychological disorders’, the data revealed a total of 2,195 individual officers took leave across the last year, averaging at 67 days each and topping last year’s figures.
Professor Stan Gilmore, a senior research fellow at the University of Exeter, said: “Police officers are exposed to high-stress situations, physical confrontations, and the possibility of injury everyday.
“Adding to that the increased risk of traumatic brain injuries and PTSD only compounds the challenges officers already face.”
Former frontline officer Daniel Simmons, explained to The Londoners that the current figures reflect years of high-pressure environments and a ‘stiff upper lip’ culture which is gradually being broken down.
He described how there was little time to decompress from intense situations, causing him to feel as though he had to compartmentalise his emotions from the job.
Simmons said: “Emergency situations happen all the time, that’s part of the job, but what you don’t expect is to have so little time between each incident.
“I remember coming home to my partner, breaking down and just uncontrollably sobbing.
“I’d bottled up so much emotion across my career that eventually I just couldn’t do it anymore.”
Simmons stated that during his time in the force, support was not as readily available as he would have hoped.
The stiff upper lip culture Simmons referenced is further exemplified in the 2025 National police well-being survey, conducted by Leapwise for Oscar Kilo.
Most notably only 18% of officers felt they would feel comfortable speaking up to senior officials, emphasising a culture which is less supportive of vulnerability.
Only 29% of police officers believed they would be supported by their force if they were struggling or made a genuine mistake – this is significantly lower than the NHS which stands at 46% and the Armed Forces at 55%.
Speaking on this, Simmons described how workplace culture meant that he, and some of his colleagues, would fear speaking up for fear of being from the frontlines to the ‘dreaded’ desk job.
Paula Dodds, Chair of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said: “Quite frankly, the support that officers get is not good enough.
“The provisions currently in place don’t help officers – we see an average of 400-600 trauma events in our careers and there’s no support for that.
“Officers are leaving policing because they can’t take it any more, which then means those officers that remain have an increased workload and witness more trauma.”
Dodds expressed that officers should be provided with regular screening and trauma training to keep checks on mental health and support colleagues who are struggling.
On 26 January 2026 Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced the largest reform to policing in two decades, setting out new white paper proposals to focus more on officer well-being.
Entitled ‘From local to national: a new model for policing’, the government set out plans to create a dedicated Mental Health Crisis Line, allowing all officers and staff to access better and more efficient mental health support.
Officers in high-risk roles will also be offered psychological risk screenings each year and trauma tracker software will be made available to every force so high risk officers will have interventions at an earlier stage.
The trauma tracker software, which will be rolled out nationally, will automatically flag when an officer has attended a higher intensity incident, triggering a mandatory welfare check before symptoms escalate into PTSD.
Mahmood also laid out that mandatory training will be given around resilience and mental health for new recruits, and supervisors will be introduced and treated as protected learning time.
Featured Image: John Cameron on Unsplash
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