Trauma Discussion Proves Helpful

More than 60 journalists, educators and therapists met at the Guardian Newspaper's media centre in London on the eve of the Iraq war to hear just how important it now is to attend not only to the physical safety needs of journalists and media workers covering conflict, but also to their emotional well-being.

With nearly a dozen journalists dead in the first three weeks of the military campaign, and with many more witnessing serious violence and bloodshed, it was a message whose timing could not have been more relevant.

Jack Laurence, veteran CBS reporter from the Vietnam war and author of a powerful book about war journalism, appealed with passion for provision to be made after this war for journalists to talk to each other.

"In the absence of some kind of group work," said Laurence, "you're going to get what happened to so many of my colleagues from Vietnam: suicides; life long depression; broken marriages; attempted self-destructive behaviour; and in a very high proportion.

"It's all very anecdotal for me but so many of my friends are dead today from having covered too many wars. That is: taking risks again and again and again because whatever you want to call it, their values, their self-worth etc, have been so destroyed by the effects of the trauma they didn't care any more."

Stephen Jukes, chief news editor for Reuters, spoke of how the death of the news agency's most senior war reporter Kurt Schork in Sierra Leone in 2000 had been a turning point in understanding the needs of reporters in war zones.

"Seven or eight years ago," said Jukes, "there was a great reluctance to get into Hostile Environment training. But, after a while, people realised it saves lives. And, I suspect in a few years time, the same will be said of trauma training."

Britain's renowned military commander and later campaigner for humanitarian aid during the Bosnian civil war, Colonel Bob Stewart, spoke of the importance - well understood by the British army - of mutual support.

"Fundamentally," said Stewart, "it seems to me [that] the way people can actually help is by knowing, trusting and caring about one another in small teams. Yet journalism seems to think — because of the nature of journalism — that it can't be done; and I just wonder whether that could be one of the solutions to trying to help people who are subject to stress?"

Director of Dart Centre Europe Mark Brayne told how the BBC was focusing on precisely that kind of mutual support in its new trauma training programme — drawing on the experience of Britain's Royal Marines in seeking to de-stigmatise the experience of emotional distress.

It wasn't, said Brayne, about predicting that journalists would be traumatised. It was rather a question of saying 'Hey, we work in a profession that deals with trauma, it's core to our job; 75 percent or so of everything we report has got trauma in it somewhere. Either it's the preparation for trauma. It's the experience of trauma. It's the aftermath of trauma. Let's de-stigmatise it. Let's bring it into the mainstream'.

Dart Center Executive Committee Chair Dr Frank Ochberg told the gathering how some 15% of Vietnam war veterans went on to experience Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but how that figure could rise to 50% for those who'd experienced front-line combat.

It's a figure with particular relevance for journalists "embedded" as the jargon goes with coalition troops fighting in the Iraq war. Britain's respected psychiatrist and specialist in the psychological impact of the last Gulf War, Prof. Simon Wessely, has drawn attention to how closely these reporters will have identified with their units and how they will need to be especially aware after the war of the impact of losing those relationships and also processing what they have experienced.

Speaking at the Guardian event, CNN's Jim Bolden spoke of how journalists no longer had the luxury of saying 'I'm a business news journalist, or I'm a general news journalist, I only do this'.

"Last year I was sent to cover the Bradford riots," said Bolden. "The team consisted of a business reporter, a business producer, a business cameraman and a business editor. None of us had any hostile environment training, and none of us had ever been in anything like that before. It was an eye-opener to us, and an eye-opener to our desk.

"Those of us who are writing journalists may be using a camera; cameras have become a target. And, we can find ourselves in the field on our own. We won't have three people watching our back — that is something very new for us as well."

Since that Guardian discussion, the death and turmoil in the reality of the Iraq war has further emphasised just how important it is for news organisations to have emotional as well as physical safety support in place for their teams.