Covering tragedy can create immense psychological
stress for journalists. Sometimes it makes sense to get help.
By Sherry Ricchiardi From AJR,
January/February1999
SIFTING THROUGH GRISLY AUTOPSY
reports on abused, murdered children, Arizona Republic reporter Karina
Bland was transfixed by a Polaroid photo. It was stapled to a police file
labeled ``Ashley Guerard, 8 months,'' and showed a tiny pink coffin. Bland
made a mental note to describe it in her copy as ``the size of a dresser
drawer.'' The image wouldn't rest until
publication, though. It repeatedly surfaced in dreams, in which Bland
would spot the doll-sized coffin at her office, in a convenience store, or
nestled among her belongings in a drawer at home.
``It was horrible. It was so real,''
Bland says of the dreams. So were more sleep-halting nightmares about
young children burned, beaten and sexually defiled.
During the four-month investigation
leading to ``What Happens When Adults Kill Kids,'' an award-winning 1997
package, the reporter developed constant nausea and lost 15 pounds. At
first she tried coping by ``getting loaded on beer'' with a neighbor
sympathetic to her rage over lenient sentences for child killers. But the
nightmares continued. Finally, Bland
turned to a crisis counselor. ``I was so embarrassed,'' she confesses. ``I
didn't even tell anybody for the longest time.'' Her editor was one of the
few people in whom she confided in the newsroom. There, ``nobody talks
about this stuff. We interview people about trauma and we see horrible
things all the time, but we never consider how it affects us.''
Bland's experience points up the dilemma
for journalists confronting horror, whether in police files, on highways
or at house fires, at the bombed ruins of a federal building, or in
Rwandan streets red with blood. Though such coverage can create immense
psychological stress, the standard newsroom script calls for stoicism.
Admitting to emotional fall-out collides with the detached, dispassionate
demeanor on which the profession prides itself.
``Some people do shy away from this
issue and pooh-pooh it,'' acknowledges Chris Cramer, president of CNN's
international news division. ``They fear being exiled as some kind of a
wimp.'' The toll from chronicling human
suffering is ``one of the things I always dreaded talking about,'' admits
Rick Bragg, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter who has
covered the Oklahoma City bombing and other ghastly episodes of American
life. For those in the newsgathering
business, seeking professional help can be perilous. Some journalists who
have covered gruesome stories say they fear that admitting to any mental
distress may be viewed as weakness. It may even spark editors to pull them
off important projects or move them to ``softer'' assignments.
But ignoring the trauma doesn't make it
go away, as Bland learned. Nightmares, flashbacks and obsessive images are
the normal consequences of witnessing horror, health experts say. Their
research shows the effects of stress can be cumulative; denying or
``stuffing'' the aftermath of trauma can turn minds into time bombs.
Some news operations have begun
addressing the shocks their staffers face on the job (see ``Working Through the
Anguish,''). Cramer, while head of newsgathering for the British
Broadcasting Corp. in London, helped launch debriefing programs for
journalists handling high-risk assignments. Select TV stations and
newspapers have brought mental health pros right into the newsroom
following a catastrophe. Still other companies discreetly direct their
employees to therapy. Journalists
seeking professional treatment first must wrestle with an entrenched macho
culture. Those unwilling to do so look for other ways to cope.
MEDIA SCHOLAR CLEVE WILHOIT
likens journalists to World War II veterans. ``They are just beginning to
talk'' about their feelings relating to trauma, the Indiana University
professor says. ``The acceptance of the fact of their own emotional
involvement seems to be very difficult for them.''
Journalists--along with combat soldiers,
police officers, firefighters and emergency medical teams--can be at risk
for stress symptoms and even post-traumatic stress disorder by virtue of
the awful things they see. There is one
major difference, though. Of these groups, all but the media usually
receive special instruction for dealing with traumatic events, say experts
interviewed for this story. The others undergo mandatory debriefing for
what has become known as ``critical incident stress.'' Despite training,
some soldiers who fought in the Persian Gulf War suffered post-traumatic
stress disorders. Why should journalists who document the carnage expect
to be invulnerable? Among those
professionals at the highest risk of stress, psychiatrist Frank Ochberg
finds, surgeons and journalists have most strongly resisted outside help.
``Journalists, by habit or culture, refuse to feel their grief, their
horror, their anxiety,'' says Ochberg, who helped develop a Michigan State
University journalism program on how to cover trauma and its victims.
Talk to reporters who have written about
some aspect of horror, and Ochberg's assessment rings true.
Most of the media professionals
interviewed for this article had not sought debriefing after covering
terrible events, even though counseling often was covered by employee
assistance plans and, in some cases, psychologists were brought into the
newsroom. Their main reasons: lack of time, especially in deadline
reporting, and the strong belief of reporters that outsiders couldn't
understand the rigors of being a witness on behalf of society.
At the Baltimore Sun, ``we're offering
counseling for anyone who wants it,'' says City Editor James Asher.
Counselors are available through the company's employee assistance
program. But few, if any, reporters have
publicly acknowledged using the service. ``We had a reporter who was an
official witness at an execution last night,'' Asher said in November. ``I
asked her if she wanted to talk to a counselor about it, and she
declined.'' Foreign correspondents,
general assignment reporters and photographers face the greatest exposure
to trauma, responding as they do to accidents, fires and other harrowing
situations. ``The longer you're exposed to difficult things, the harder it
is to deal with those things unless there is some formal support,'' says
Roger Simpson, head of the Journalism and Trauma Program at the University
of Washington in Seattle. That was the
primary finding of his 1996 study of 131 journalists--editors, reporters
and photographers from six papers in Michigan and Washington. The longer
the exposure, the more likely a respondent had experienced avoidance
tendencies and intrusive thoughts. Such symptoms were most prevalent among
those who'd covered automobile crashes, says Simpson, an associate
professor of journalism. Coverage of
crashes and other emergencies often falls to rookies. To diminish the
stress, the Journalism and Trauma Program aims to inoculate journalism
students via role-playing and discussion. ``I guess it's like a
vaccination,'' Simpson says. ``If you do this in the classroom, it may be
somewhat easier at a crash.'' Some
researchers theorize that reporters and photographers are potential
secondary victims of trauma by the very function they perform.
``Their hearts are exposed even if they
are looking through a lens,'' cautions Martin Cohen, a Florida
psychologist who has worked with journalists at the Poynter Institute for
Media Studies. ``They are injected with a poison, a certain kind of energy
that can affect them for a long time if they don't deal with it. The mere
exposure to trauma can be traumatic.''
The need for the media to click into
another mode when recording horrific events, nudging aside normal human
reactions, sometimes can trigger psychological reactions. Cohen recommends
debriefing between 24 and 72 hours after exposure. During that critical
period, he says, journalists have the best chance to squeeze the
``poison'' out of their systems. So some
news organizations quickly set up intervention--especially when tragedy
strikes at home. Hours after a bomb tore
open Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995,
killing 168 people, the Daily Oklahoman invited a counselor into its
newsroom. And CBS affiliate KWTV offered group debriefing and individual
counseling for its staff. Journalists'
jobs at first were so demanding that they pushed their feelings aside,
says Sue McMillon, KWTV's human resources manager. ``But by the fourth and
fifth days, people were wearing thin. All that emotion hidden behind
cameras and microphones surfaced.''
Approximately 35 journalists--almost all
of those involved in the coverage--attended the station's first formal
debriefing session at a nearby hotel. Follow-up counseling was offered at
the station a month later and on the first anniversary of the blast.
RESEARCHERS POINT OUT THAT the
media, in helping audiences see and feel human tragedy, must process
information profoundly to convey it effectively. And that can spark
greater emotional turmoil. ``Because I
felt [the horror] so strongly, I wrote more graphically so people could
feel it,'' says Bland, the Arizona Republic reporter. ``I had to go
through the suffering and put myself in a pretty awful place to do that.''
``You're not just an objective
journalist doing your job,'' says psychologist Cohen, ``but a human being
who has been exposed to something awful. To whatever degree the
compassionate heart still works, there are going to be consequences for
seeing someone else's suffering.''
Gordon Turnbull agrees. Director of a
traumatic stress unit in London, the psychologist reminds his clients at
the BBC that sensitive individuals cannot completely block horrendous
recollections. The flashbacks and nightmares they're likely to suffer are,
Turnbull says, ``part of a normal reaction in normal people.''
There are other repercussions. Studies
show that people in high-risk professions--including journalism--are more
prone to serious problems, from divorce to alcoholism or drug abuse.
They're also more likely to suffer high blood pressure and heart attacks.
Or worse.
There is no way of knowing whether
therapy could have saved Kevin Carter from the demons roaming his
subconscious. The freelance photographer and South Africa native won a
Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his photograph of a vulture stalking a starving
girl who'd collapsed on her way to a feeding station in southern Sudan.
The image, published in the New York Times, became a metaphor for Africa's
despair. Carter called the experience
``the most horrifying of my career.'' In July 1994, two months after
collecting one of journalism's highest honors, the 33-year-old
photojournalist's body was found by police in his red pickup truck near a
Johannesburg suburb. He had died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
``The pain of his mission, to open the
eyes of the world to so many of the issues and injustices that tore at his
own soul, eventually got to him,'' his sister wrote in a letter to Time
magazine. Carter's father told the South African Press Association that
``Kevin always carried around the horror of the work he did.''
Time magazine, in marking Carter's
death, reported that after taking the picture, he ``sat under a tree, lit
a cigarette, talked to God and cried.'' The article quoted one of the
photographer's friends, freelance journalist Joao Silva: ``He was
depressed afterward.... He kept saying he wanted to hug his daughter.''
Indeed, the Pulitzer came with a storm
of criticism. ``The man adjusting his
lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a
predator, another vulture on the scene,'' said a 1994 article in the St.
Petersburg Times. In a suicide note left under his knapsack, Carter wrote:
``I'm really sorry. The pain of life overrides the joy to the point that
joy does not exist.'' He also described being depressed and ``haunted by
the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain...of
starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen.''
Afterward, James Nachtwey, a
photographer for Magnum photo agency who often saw Carter on assignments,
was quoted as saying: ``Every photographer who has been involved in these
stories [of extreme human suffering] has been affected. You become changed
forever. Nobody does this kind of work to make themselves feel good. It is
very hard to continue.'' Some
journalists, worn down by repugnant scenes, beg off of extremely stressful
stories. After several years of covering corruption and murder in East St.
Louis, Michael Sorkin asked his editors at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch not
to tap him for any more ``blood stories.''
``I wasn't asking for lighter
assignments,'' says Sorkin, who won a 1993 award from Investigative
Reporters & Editors for stories leading to the conviction of a corrupt
city prosecutor. ``But never again do I want to go to a mother and ask for
a photo of a dead child. I have seen enough blood for two lifetimes.''
Some journalists find comfort in the
knowledge that their work instigates social change or brings about
justice. ``If I get the story and I see
that it has made a difference, I can sleep at night,'' says Newsday's Roy
Gutman, who won a 1993 Pulitzer for exposing Serb-run concentration camps
in Bosnia. ``What gives me sleepless nights, what could traumatize me,
would be if I got a major part of the story wrong.''
Others who routinely cover violence try
to creatively vent stress in their off hours. While on assignment for the
Associated Press in Somalia and Iraq, combat photographer John Gaps wrote
poetry. The descriptive verses, compiled in a journal, were ``a way of
reminding myself how I felt about what I was seeing,'' Gaps says.
Still, macabre details haunted him. In
one case, it was the image of a silver watch on the wrist of a Serbian
soldier whose head had been blown off by a rocket during the 1991 war in
Croatia. ``His boots were still laced up, nice and tidy, and the watch was
running,'' Gaps recalls. ``Those are the little things that take away your
ability to reason later on.'' It was 12
years before the photographer felt the full measure of documenting blood
and gore. Gaps suffered repeated anxiety attacks--unexpected and painful
spasms in his chest. ``At first, I thought I was having a heart attack. I
thought I was dying,'' he recalls. When
the anxiety persisted, Gaps turned to a psychologist: ``She helped me
learn to say, `Oops, here we go again. OK, I'm not dying. Just breathe and
relax and ignore it.' '' Gaps assembled
a collection of his poetry and photos--chronicling the suffering in
Somalia, Iraq, Haiti and elsewhere--while recovering from a bullet wound
inflicted in 1994 by a sniper in the Gaza Strip. The result was ``God Left
Us Alone Here: A Book of War.'' Gaps describes the 1997 book, published by
Lone Oaks Press, as ``my pressure relief valve.''
To divert herself from the horrors of
covering genocide in Rwanda, Lindsey Hilsum redesigned the kitchen in her
London apartment. ``That might sound heartless, but you have to find some
way to stuff it aside a bit,'' explains the diplomatic correspondent for
London's Channel 4 News. ``You lock it away in your head and do something
else.'' Hilsum was one of few foreign
journalists in the Rwandan capital of Kigali when the slaughter started in
1994. Working her way through roadblocks amid shelling and gunfire, Hilsum
saw piles of dismembered bodies. During a visit to a local hospital, she
watched a mother carry in a baby whose leg dangled by a single tendon.
``The gutters in the hospital were literally running with blood,'' she
recalls. The reporter felt helpless,
especially in the first flush of killings, when she fielded frantic phone
calls from locals she had befriended. Gangs were coming to murder them,
they said, and they begged her to save them. ``The worst thing is the fact
that I didn't save anybody,'' Hilsum says. ``I felt if I put them in the
car they'd be slaughtered at road blocks. I don't know. Maybe I should
have tried, but I didn't.'' Nor has she
since sought any psychological help for herself. ``What kind of counselor
am I going to find in London--someone who doesn't even know where Rwanda
is?'' Hilsum adds. ``The problem isn't me; it's not in my head. I have a
right to be upset about this. It was an awful, dreadful thing I
witnessed.''
UNSPOKEN BUT DE FACTO
RESISTANCE to therapy was common after the Oklahoma City bombing, too.
Though the Daily Oklahoman brought in a counselor, only two dozen
reporters and photographers out of a newsroom staff of 150 participated in
the initial crisis counseling. Over the weeks, their numbers dwindled to
10 or fewer. Counseling ``was a useful
tool to have. I just wish more people who were up against the building, as
I call it, would have used it,'' Managing Editor Ed Kelley says.
Penny Owen was one of the front-line
reporters who declined counseling. Thirty minutes after the blast, she
watched mangled bodies being hauled out of the rubble in her hometown. She
heard the screams and saw survivors' shocked faces. Afterward, she found
it difficult to be alone at home, so she lingered in the newsroom. ``We
did a lot of talking when we caught our breath,'' she says.
Like many who experience trauma, Owen
had a delayed reaction. ``I almost fell apart [on] the first
anniversary,'' she says. ``I'm pretty tough; I'm not the whiny or
emotional type, but this blindsided me.'' Covering the trials of Timothy
McVeigh and Terry Nichols, who were convicted in connection with the
bombing, was no easier. Owen shed tears as frightful details emerged. And,
after particularly wrenching testimony on December 31, 1996, the reporter
canceled her New Year's Eve plans, called a friend and wept. ``I was in an
agitated state, almost a rage,'' Owen says. ``My reaction shocked me. It
really did.'' Even then, she avoided
professional help. ``I've never really been one who took advantage of
counseling in a formal way,'' she says. Owen was concerned she'd come off
as a victim, when ``there were so many real victims out there.''
Likewise, an aversion to victim status
has kept the Times' Bragg from airing his feelings with a therapist. ``I
never felt it was appropriate to whine,'' says the reporter, who went from
covering the Oklahoma City bombing to a multiple murder in New Orleans. He
also covered the 1998 murders of nine children by two classmates in
Jonesboro, Arkansas. Journalists may be
heartbroken by the misery they witness, but, Bragg says, ``We can't act
like it or we can't get the job done.''
The face of a woman he met in Oklahoma
City burns in his memory. She'd lost her husband, and ``that is real
hurt,'' Bragg says. ``What's happened to us is something so much less.
That doesn't mean what happens to us isn't serious. But I don't feel I
have a right to call myself a victim. A good cop reporter sees far worse
stuff than I do.'' Bragg has not taken
advantage of the New York Times' counseling program. He will, he says, if
he wakes up one day and feels a need to ``spill my guts.''
For Karina Bland, talking with a
professional proved uplifting. Two sessions into counseling, the obsessive
images began to fade. She attributes that to ``talking to an objective
third person who didn't know me. It helped me gain new perspective.''
It also helped, Bland says, that her
work prompted a public outcry and led Arizona to toughen its sentencing
laws for child killers. Appearing on talk shows with some of the experts
she'd interviewed provided more relief. ``That was so good for me,'' she
says. ``It was no longer just my burden.'' Finally, her volunteer work for
Big Brothers/Big Sisters has reminded her that ``there are healthy kids
out there.'' Persuading media managers
to promote intervention as a normal part of newsroom life might go a long
way toward easing the resistance, says Cohen, the psychologist. ``The rank
and file are not going to ask for it. They fear it would be interpreted as
a weakness when, in fact, it is wisdom.''
The Daily Oklahoman's Ed Kelley needs no
convincing. He strongly advocates a change in newsroom culture.
``We're taught in journalism school that
this is a macho business, that you check your feelings at the door, that
your personal emotions have nothing to do with it,'' the managing editor
says. ``Unlike anybody else in this society, we're supposed to shut it all
out. ``It's a myth. We can't do it.''
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