Police who can no longer cope with trauma and stress should have access to high status desk jobs to combat mental illness and prevent suicides, psychologists say.

Michael Burge, director of the Australian College of Trauma Treatment in Victoria said cultural change was needed within the police service to stop "blaming the victim" of mental illness.

Clinical psychologist, Stephen Heydt, who has worked with police since 1982, said police academies were churning out police every year knowing many would fall out of the system as a result of injuries including mental illness.

"It's all so horribly predictable," he said after Fairfax Media highlighted the hidden problem of suicides and mental illness with the police force on Monday. "The suicides are predictable, the drug alcohol and gambling addictions are predictable, the family breakups are predictable. The domestic violence among police officers which never gets spoken about is also predicable."

After ten years in the front line, many police felt it was all they were good for and found it difficult to cope with change. Mr Heydt said they should be rotated in and out of frontline policing every five years.