Rick Baker, has been providing evidence-based behavioral health services to first responders and responder agencies in North Carolina since 2007. He is the current Clinical Director of the Western North Carolina Peer Support Network, overseeing a team of nearly 500 trained peers (from all disciplines) providing oversight of and post-critical incident services to first responders in North Carolina’s 22 westernmost counties. Rick is one of only 3 clinicians the US Department of the Interior and US Department of Agriculture contract with to provide post-critical incident care to the nation’s approximately 60,000 wildland firefighters and wildland law enforcement personnel throughout the nation and the Caribbean. He’s a researcher on first responder suicide and has lectured nationally and locally on that topic and many others.

In 2017, he founded Responder Support Services, Inc. (RSS), to provide a broad range of clinical and non-clinical services to first responders, responder agencies, county/local governments, and the federal government.  Rick created the ‘outpatient model’ for Embedded Behavioral Healthcare in civilian emergency services.  Rick is also fully credentialed with the 9/11 World Trade Center Health Program and provides care to a number of 9/11 first responders. In 2018, Rick participated in a 1 year train-the-trainer program at Emory University School of Medicine on Prolonged Exposure therapy, the gold standard treatment for PTSD in first responders and military veterans.  Most recently, in 2023, Rick was a contributing author on an academic book, First Responder Mental Health: A clinician’s guide (Springer Publishing).  Rick and RSS are participating with two different groups in the US and Europe to launch clinical trials on new treatments for PTSD in first responder populations.