Staying Afloat: The Realities of Being a Lifeguard

In my training as a lifeguard, I was told that when doing compressions for CPR you are supposed to hear the victim’s ribs break. This always freaked me out. Not because I felt incapable of saving someone’s life, it was because I knew I had to hurt someone in order to give them a second chance at living. 

But most lifeguards will almost never be in that situation. My coworkers always told me that nothing ever happens and there is some truth to that. My job mainly consisted of telling kids not to run on the deck, grabbing balls from the backroom and, on the odd day, handling an innocent nose bleed. Yet, we were trained to treat spinal injuries, broken limbs, and heart attacks because in an aquatic environment, despite its rarity, they are all very possible. 

As a result, when there was an emergency, I was conditioned to treat physical injuries. But this wasn’t always the situation I was presented, I have dealt with more mental health crises than physical ones. 

The first emergency I was ever part of was a mental crisis. An elderly woman who was attending an aquafit class had an anxiety attack after forgetting to take her medication earlier that morning. Yet, as the woman was screaming, crying, and lying down in a puddle as the pool water dripped off her body, three guards, a supervisor, and an aquatic coordinator could not figure out what she was experiencing. It was only after an ambulance was called that a paramedic confirmed that the woman was indeed experiencing an anxiety attack.

After this experience, I felt as if I served the woman to the best of my capability but not to the fullest capacity. I was never trained to deal with people in moments of mental crisis nor have I ever predicted that my job will allow me to cross paths with people who would experience them. 

It was reported in a 2019 statistic from the Canadian Mental Health Association that in any given year 1 in 5 Canadians will experience a mental health problem or illness. This highlights the commonality of mental health illnesses, yet the system continuously fails to serve people in mental distress.

It was only a couple of months later where I would have to deal with another woman who was tangled up in the system. One morning as I walked into work I was told by the other lifeguards that a woman who struggled with her mental health will be swimming at our pool. She was known to have PTSD which caused her to have regular outbursts if she was triggered. 

Completely accepting of her situation, our pool welcomed her with open arms and encouraged her to swim with us. Our pool even modified some aspects of our program to minimize anything that could potentially be a trigger to her PTSD. However, despite our efforts, this only lasted around a month.  

The last day the woman swam at our pool ended in a verbal altercation between some workers, the woman’s mother, and our regular swimmers. The woman experienced yet another outburst which resulted in some of the workers ordering her to leave the pool. The woman’s mother came to her defence blaming her outbursts on her condition. However, the rules are the rules and we had to enforce them. 

It didn’t feel right having to ask the woman to leave based on something that was out of her control but it really came down to rules and protocol. This is the problem. First responder protocols are not cut out to serve the needs of people who are mentally ill and as a result, they are shunned from the community, marginalized or, at the worst extent, killed.   

According to a CBC News Investigation, between the years of 2000 to 2018 around 460 people died at the hands of police officers and around 42 per cent of those people suffered from mental illnesses. We can see this statistic in action this year with the unfortunate death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Indigenous-Ukrainian-Black Canadian woman who fell off a 27 storey balcony after her family called police to take their daughter to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.

The death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet opened up conversations about policing and mental health arguing that police protocols, especially when it involves Black and Indigenous individuals, are approached inappropriately in ways that too often end up in death.

This calls for a serious change in policing when responding to calls concerning individuals dealing with mental illnesses as police interactions have not always been beneficial. Take for example another situation that happened in British Columbia, where surveillance footage captured an RCMP officer dragging a student after being called in for a wellness check. 

This all trickles down into lifeguarding because, as a person who serves their community, I find that the rules that I am paid to enforce are not inclusive to everyone. If I am ever faced with another situation where a patron is in mental distress, the only way I can help them is through my past experiences. But this is not enough considering mental health is a boundless spectrum that deals with more than what I have witnessed.

I believe that the commonality of mental health crises calls for reform in training. Experiences alone do not replace the fact that not every lifeguard is equipped to understand those in states of vulnerability.