The tragedy that occurred on 9 June once again highlights the issue of vulnerability among law enforcement personnel, the need for sustainable and long-term strategies for the prevention of psychological distress, and the urgency of moving beyond an organizational culture in which seeking support may still be perceived as a sign of weakness rather than an act of responsibility
Abstract: The death in Florence of Carabinieri officer Alessandro Borea, identified by available sources as the father of three children and reported as a suicide on 9 June 2026, calls for a sober and responsible reflection on a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to a mere news story of personal tragedy. Every act of suicide belongs to a complex individual history and does not lend itself to immediate explanations. However, when it involves a member of a uniformed service, it also acquires an institutional dimension, raising questions about the culture of service, the relationship between discipline and vulnerability, the management of occupational stress, the accessibility of psychological support, and the capacity of public administrations to establish permanent structures for listening, protection, and prevention.
Keywords: #Carabinieri #AlessandroBorea #Florence #SuicidesAmongUniformedPersonnel #VulnerabilityInUniform #MentalHealth #OrganizationalWellbeing #Prevention #LawEnforcement #CarabinieriCorps #OccupationalStress #PsychologicalSupport #MassimilianoMancini #EthicaSocietas #EthicaSocietasJournal #ScientificJournal #HumanSciences #SocialSciences #ethicasocietasupli
The Unstoppable Trail of Blood
The news of the death of Carabinieri officer Alessandro Borea, which occurred in Florence on 9 June 2026, extends the tragic thread that appears to have undergone a terrible acceleration in recent times, involving all uniformed services. The officer, a father of three, was described as a cheerful and active person, as also reflected in his commitment to the Nuovo Sindacato Carabinieri in Tuscany. In this case too, the act remains unexplained, as he had reportedly never shown signs of distress or mentioned to colleagues any particular problems affecting him.
It is not necessary to dwell on the manner or place in which the act occurred, in accordance with international guidelines on suicide reporting, which have long emphasized the need to avoid unnecessary details concerning methods, to refrain from romanticizing the act, and to avoid reducing it to a single cause (World Health Organization, 2021). The relevant fact is that, with this tragedy, the number of members of the Police Forces and Armed Forces who have taken their own lives since the beginning of 2026 has risen to 27, including 10 members of the Carabinieri Corps (Infodifesa, 2026). This amounts to more than one death per week: an alarming sequence of deaths among uniformed personnel that requires broader reflection on the relationship between service, vulnerability, organizational culture, and prevention.
The Uniform and the Paradox of Mandatory Strength
The uniform produces a powerful symbolic effect, because those who wear it are perceived as orderly, steady, reliable, disciplined, capable of intervening in conflict, facing emergencies, absorbing the unexpected, and ensuring the safety of others. Yet this representation, while necessary to the public function, can become dangerous when it erases the person behind the role and leads the operator to perceive vulnerability as incompatible with the expected professional image.
The Carabinieri officer, the police officer, the local police officer, the soldier, and every public safety operator often live within a double bind: on the one hand, they are expected to embody firmness, self-control, and reliability; on the other, precisely because they are exposed to responsibilities, shifts, conflicts, bereavements, threats, disciplinary or judicial proceedings, hierarchical pressure, social expectations, and family difficulties, they may experience forms of suffering that would require timely listening and discreet protection. Literature on police work and professions exposed to critical incidents has shown how operational stress, exposure to suffering, a culture of self-control, and fear of stigma can deeply affect the psychological health of personnel, especially when organizations lack credible channels for support and emotional processing (Violanti, 2014; Figley, 1995).
The problem arises when professional culture allows external danger to be recognized but struggles to recognize internal danger; when it trains personnel to manage other people’s emergencies but does not always prepare them to name their own vulnerability; when it measures an operator’s resilience by the ability not to show weakness, rather than by the ability to seek help before breaking point. Discipline is indispensable, but it cannot become emotional mutism; operational efficiency is a value, but it cannot replace care for the people who make service possible; hierarchy is part of the organizational structure, but it must not prevent the creation of trusted channels through which distress can emerge without automatically becoming stigma, suspicion, or professional penalty.
Suicide in Uniform as a Personal and Institutional Event
Every suicide remains, first and foremost, a personal, family, and emotional tragedy, and must be treated with respect, restraint, and rejection of sensationalism. However, when it occurs within or around armed organizations, it also acquires an institutional dimension, because those who wear a uniform operate in contexts in which psychological suffering may be rendered less visible by a culture of self-control, a strong sense of honour, hierarchical constraints, fear of professional consequences, and access to highly lethal means.
Durkheim had already shown, at the end of the nineteenth century, that suicide cannot be read solely as an individual act, because it is also situated within forms of integration, regulation, and social belonging. Contemporary psychology has further highlighted how psychic pain, a sense of entrapment, perceived lack of belonging, and the belief of being a burden may, under certain conditions, contribute to increasing suicide risk (Durkheim, 1897/2005; Shneidman, 1993; Joiner, 2005). Applying these categories to the world of uniformed services does not mean automatically explaining any specific case, since every story remains unique, but it helps us understand why organizations with high symbolic intensity must equip themselves with permanent tools for listening, prevention, and protection.
Access to weapons, in particular, must not be addressed ideologically, since it is part of many operational functions and responds to service requirements. Precisely for this reason, however, public administrations have a duty to build prevention systems capable of identifying acute crises and enabling temporary, confidential, and non-punitive protective measures, so that seeking help is not perceived as the first step toward marginalization, loss of trust, or career damage. The decisive point is not to blame the institution, nor to automatically attribute every responsibility to it, but to recognize that organizations can reduce or amplify risk depending on the quality of the internal climate, the credibility of listening channels, the training of commanders, the availability of independent psychological support, the management of critical incidents, and the ability to distinguish temporary vulnerability from professional unreliability.
Florence and the Memory of Other Tragedies
The Florence case carries an additional density because the city had already been marked by the case of Beatrice Belcuore, the 25-year-old Carabinieri trainee who died in 2024 inside the Carabinieri Marshals and Brigadiers School in Florence. That case opened a painful debate on distress, stress, military training, and the capacity of institutional structures to listen early to signs of suffering. According to press reports, the investigation into that death was closed, but the public and family debate that followed left an open wound in the collective perception of the relationship between training, discipline, and vulnerability (Controradio, 2025; Fanpage, 2025).
Different stories must not be overlapped, because each case retains its own autonomy and no case can automatically explain another. Nevertheless, the recurrence of tragedies involving men and women in uniform makes a purely individual reading of the phenomenon increasingly unsustainable, as if each death were only a private matter and not also a signal to be addressed within a broader institutional reflection. The Carabinieri Corps, like every organization of high hierarchical and symbolic intensity, lives by discipline, belonging, sense of duty, and willingness to sacrifice; precisely for this reason, it must equip itself with tools capable of protecting the person before the role completely absorbs their need to be heard.
In recent years, some Carabinieri trade-union organizations have called for the establishment of a permanent observatory on suicides and psychological distress among personnel, proposing a more structured dialogue with the leadership of the institution and seeking to remove the issue from the sphere of purely emotional reaction following the most dramatic events. This request, also advanced after the death of Beatrice Belcuore, remains strongly relevant today, because the problem is not merely to count tragedies, but to understand whether real, confidential, accessible, and non-stigmatizing pathways exist through which a service member can seek help before suffering becomes irreversible (Nuovo Sindacato Carabinieri, 2024).
From Condolence to Stable Prevention
After every death in uniform, words of condolence are necessary because they acknowledge the dignity of the person, the grief of the family, the shock of colleagues, and the symbolic fracture that runs through the organization. Yet they become insufficient when they remain the only response. The risk is that condolence turns into a repeated institutional ritual, intense in the days immediately following the tragedy and then destined to dissolve until the next episode occurs.
The prevention of suicide among uniformed personnel cannot be entrusted solely to the sensitivity of individual commanders, the goodwill of colleagues, or the individual ability to ask for help. These elements are important, but they are not enough. Permanent safeguards are needed: clear procedures, confidential and independent channels, specific training for intermediate leaders, debriefing after critical incidents, monitoring of organizational climate, support for families, and non-punitive support pathways for those going through periods of particular vulnerability. The World Health Organization has long emphasized the need for multi-level, continuous, and non-episodic strategies capable of combining reduction of risk factors, access to help, timely interventions, and responsible communication (World Health Organization, 2021).
Seeking help must be culturally reconstructed as responsible behaviour, not as failure. A service member who recognizes difficulty before it becomes unmanageable is not betraying the uniform; they are protecting themselves, their colleagues, their family, and the service. This cultural reversal is difficult, especially within organizations founded on discipline and willingness to sacrifice, but it is now necessary if psychological well-being is not to remain confined to the rhetoric that follows tragedy.
The Weight on Families and the Silence Around Pain
The fact that Alessandro Borea was reportedly the father of three children makes the family dimension of these tragedies even more evident, because every suicide does not merely break one life; it leaves behind a constellation of questions, pain, guilt, disbelief, and absences that are difficult to fill. Families of uniformed personnel often live in a particular condition, because they indirectly participate in the service, enduring its shifts, tensions, absences, fears, pressures, and emotional repercussions while remaining outside the formal structure of the organization.
A serious prevention policy should also consider this dimension, because personnel well-being cannot be separated from family life and from the quality of the emotional networks that support the operator outside service. This does not mean invading the private sphere, but recognizing that signs of distress may also emerge outside the barracks and that adequately informed, heard, and guided families can become part of a broader protective system, always with respect for confidentiality and personal dignity.
Silence remains one of the main enemies: the silence of the operator who does not want to worry others; the silence of the colleague who fears exposing themselves; the silence of the superior who does not know how to intervene; the silence of the organization that prefers to treat distress as an individual matter rather than as a structural question. It is within these silences that pain can become invisible until the point of rupture.
Mental Health as a Component of Public Safety
The mental health of uniformed personnel is not external to public safety; it is an essential component of it. An organization that demands clarity, balance, self-control, decision-making capacity, and conflict management must also guarantee conditions in which these qualities can be sustained over time. The safety of citizens also depends on the psychological safety of those who serve them, the quality of internal relationships, the possibility of processing traumatic events, and the certainty that the person will not be abandoned when they no longer correspond to the invulnerable image of the role.
The death of Alessandro Borea, although still surrounded by limited public information, cannot be filed away as a private matter without institutional consequences. Not because causes we do not know can or should be identified, but because every suicide in uniform raises the same question again: what real tools exist to detect distress before it becomes irreversible? Who can be contacted without fear? What guarantees of confidentiality are offered? What training do commanders receive? What procedures are activated after signs of suffering? What support is available for colleagues and families?
The response cannot be merely emergency-based. It must become ordinary, stable, and verifiable. It must enter training, leadership, occupational medicine, collective bargaining, trade-union culture, weapons management, stress assessment, and the responsibility of senior leadership. The uniform cannot be a place where vulnerability is hidden until it becomes tragedy; it must become a context in which vulnerability can be recognized, protected, and supported before it is too late.
ESSENTIAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alphabetcity. (2026). Morto Alessandro Borea, Firenze scossa dalla perdita: Ennesimo suicidio di un carabiniere. Alphabetcity.
Controradio. (2025). Suicidio carabiniera: Indagine archiviata per la seconda volta. Controradio.
Durkheim, É. (2005). Suicide: A study in sociology. BUR. (Original work published 1897)
Fanpage. (2025). Allieva carabiniera si tolse la vita a Firenze: Archiviata l’inchiesta. Fanpage.
Figley, C. R. (1995). Compassion fatigue: Coping with secondary traumatic stress disorder in those who treat the traumatized. Brunner/Mazel.
Il Giglio di Firenze. (2026). Firenze in lutto per la scomparsa del carabiniere Alessandro Borea. Il Giglio di Firenze.
Infodifesa. (2026). Un altro Carabiniere si è tolto la vita: Era padre di tre figlie. Infodifesa.
Joiner, T. (2005). Why people die by suicide. Harvard University Press.
Nuovo Sindacato Carabinieri. (2024). Un osservatorio sui suicidi al Comando Generale dell’Arma dei Carabinieri intitolato a Beatrice. NSC.
Shneidman, E. S. (1993). Suicide as psychache: A clinical approach to self-destructive behavior. Jason Aronson.
Violanti, J. M. (2014). Dying for the job: Police work exposure and health. Charles C Thomas.
World Health Organization. (2021). Live life: An implementation guide for suicide prevention in countries. World Health Organization.
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