ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on three interrelated concerns - the role of idealised understandings of masculinity in the framing of mental health and the treatment thereof, the barriers to help reinforced by stigma and the rhetoric of weakness and the pragmatic lack of sustained and organised mental health services offered internally to members of the South African Police Service (SAPS). The pragmatic outcome of these discourses, limitations, and managerial concerns is that officers face the threat of violent crime, and indeed the consequences, with little recourse to the services they might need in making sense of the violence they witness daily. Considering the paucity of analyses that give voice to police officers in South Africa in a substantive manner, the ethnographic lens adopted in this chapter is primarily concerned with providing a platform for these voices to be understood.
