Our company specializes in treating first responders and public safety professionals, and we are committed to creating a solid therapeutic relationship with the first responders we treat. We understand how essential it is for first responders to maintain their overall health and wellness. We also understand how demanding the work of first responders is.
At First Responder Wellness, we exclusively treat first responders because we believe that they deserve specialized care and treatment. Our team is passionate about comprehensive treatment that addresses unique mental and behavioral health concerns. We aim to ensure that first responders feel secure and cared for while in our care.
We believe that first responders can heal and thrive in their careers and personal lives with the proper support. Our team of professionals has a long history of connection to the first responder profession. We want all of our clients to feel understood and confident that they are receiving the care they need.
At First Responder Wellness, we are committed to confidential, trusted, and effective treatment. We offer multiple treatment options to suit each client’s specific needs, and we encourage building peer relationships while in our care. It is important to remember that help is always available, and you are not alone.
Stephen Odom PhD, MFT
Founder // Chief Clinical Officer
I have been a healthcare provider and leader for the past 30 years. I’ve worked in large not for profit healthcare systems managing behavioral health and addiction treatment services, consulting in emergency rooms and medical floors and providing direct care. When I was leading and providing services in the dual diagnosis program at El Camino hospital in the San Francisco Bay Area I had the opportunity to begin working with nurses in treatment. It was transformative for me to see them as both colleagues and as patients. Observing how they had a difficult time transitioning from being the nurse to being the patient and how that need to help others never went away. By creating a nurses only program we were able to create a safe space for these healers to drop their defenses and do the work of recovery. Since then I have created programs specifically for physicians and other professionals and began building a first responder program 12 years ago. While running all the behavioral health addiction services at Hoag Hospital in Southern California, we were able to begin serving a large law enforcement department but weren’t able to separate the LEO population completely from the other patients. Time after time, the officer/patient shut down in group because they couldn’t relate to the other participants. The need for first responder only care became ever more clear in my mind. I created Simple Recovery in 2012 and spent 6 years building our services to focus on First Responder Only treatment. In 2018, First Responder Wellness was born.
The underlying concept for first responder treatment is based on years of experience treating those who are the healers, the helpers and the public servants on the front lines; when they get help in an environment where the only other patients are just like them, the walls come down and the healing happens sooner. These special heroes have a place where their unique careers are no longer a defense against looking inside because everyone else in the room is a special hero too.
My interest in working with first responders is born of my family background. My father served in Vietnam as an army physician. When he returned, he opened a “drug free clinic” to help those who had suffered from PTSD and addiction in the early 1970s. David Smith, the founder of the Haight Ashbury clinics in San Francisco, flew out and trained my dad on detox protocols and stayed in our home when I was a little kid. My father’s oldest brother – my uncle – was career army and served as the director of the NSA and retired as a Major General. His son – my cousin – recently retired as a Brigadier General and was the regimental commander of the Rangers. My step brother was a DEA agent, and we have a former police chief, and a few volunteer firefighters, too. The rest of my family is comprised of health care providers and educators; physicians, psychologists, teachers and administrators. Our dinner table and reunion conversations have often focused on the need to provide help for the helpers and first responders.
Having a deep and comprehensive knowledge of how to best provide behavioral health treatment services over the course of a few decades has prepared me to bring my very best to first responder only treatment. There is certainly something noble and necessary in our desire to address the very real mental health and addiction problems that permeate the public safety profession. The risks taken, the tragedies witnessed and the relentless need for presence around the clock create the recipe that results in post-traumatic stress, anxiety, depression, and the need to self-medicate with alcohol, substances, and many other unhealthy behaviors. We have built a program that also understands the effects of a public safety career on the family and address the entire system so healing can begin. Please contact us – we know how to help.
Contact or call us today at 888-443-4898 to learn more about our programs and how we can help.
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License/Certification #/ Expiration Date: 300405BP 12/31/2024; 300405CP 6/30/2025
First Responder Wellness
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all of the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside of it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.