Zero Responders may be exposed to things they might not be trained for, especially members of the public with no training. Often professionals in these incidents go into 'procedural' mode, and delay the mental processing of the incident until its over. Zero responders without this knowledge or experience will often become overwhelmed by the incident as the mental processing is more acute.

Zero responders can often feel after the incident that they 'could have done more', this may be due to lack of equipment or lack of understanding of how incidents are managed. This is often exacerbated where there are fatalities.

Zero responders are often hard to follow up on or account for, therefore they often get overlooked by organisations in hot/cold de-briefs as they don't belong to an organisation for aftercare and support. Don't forget zero responders may be survivors of the incident.