What About the Journalists?

By Judith Matloff, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted December 23, 2004.

Weekends spent alone at home, drinking to the point of unconsciousness. Romances that always seem to crumble after a couple of months. Feeling too paranoid to go to a movie or too agitated to sleep. This is a story about the invisible wounds that journalists often suffer when covering war. Anyone who has covered violence is aware of the psychic damage it can wreak — the guilt, the sense of being a parasite, the unbearable pettiness of daily life. The tribe of war correspondents is notoriously macho, and to even admit the damage — let alone surrender to it — has always been considered a sign of weakness. We are dispassionate chroniclers, after all, protected by the talisman of the notebook and the camera. The standard practice has been to go forth with a bottle of Scotch, absorb the pain and fear, and never tell your editors.

This denial has by no means disappeared, but the collective trauma of September 11 ushered post-traumatic stress disorder into the national lexicon, and it is beginning to usher therapists into the newsroom as well. The public and the medical community have a better understanding of trauma and its impact than they did just a decade ago, and the growing number of women on the battlefield — with their willingness to share their anguish — has made it easier for male colleagues to open up. With a new wave of emotionally scarred reporters coming out of Iraq (many of them relative rookies), editors are realizing that it will take more than flak jackets and “hostile environment training” to keep correspondents healthy. Among other things, they are introducing confidential hotlines for journalists who need help, and scrutinizing e-mail for signs of distress. “The wall of resistance is just coming down,” says Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist based in Michigan who works with traumatized journalists.

It’s about time.

Greg Marinovich, a freelance photographer, felt a deep sense of impotence as he witnessed a gruesome period of South Africa’s history in the early 1990s, when his daily routine involved taking pictures of people being shot or hacked to death. When he won a Pulitzer in 1991, he found it difficult to celebrate. The winning photos, taken for the AP, were of a mob savagely murdering a man. Marinovich had been unable to save the victim as he was dragged from a train in Soweto by five men who then beat and stoned him and stabbed him in the head before dousing him with gasoline and setting him on fire. “I felt shock, repulsion, fear, excitement, dread — always the dread,” he says. “Now, having said that, there is the issue of enjoying, and being excited at, getting good photographs. So all these weird and disturbing thoughts, combined with the fact that we were earning money, added to the guilt — terrific guilt.”

During the same period, one of Marinovich’s best friends, Ken Oosterbroek, also a photographer, was shot dead in a crossfire just yards away from him in Tokoza township. Marinovich took a bullet in the chest in that incident and nearly died. He recovered, went back to work, and later buried two more colleagues who had committed suicide. Marinovich escaped the numbing trap of drugs and alcohol that ensnared many of the journalists he worked with, but he endured terrible spells of depression and, as he puts it, “destroyed some relationships.”

Science suggests that a terrifying experience alters the chemistry in the brain. The amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the brain that researchers believe is tied to memory, releases cascades of stress hormones such as adrenaline. Such hormones change the way the mind processes information during times of stress, lodging images like snapshots in the memory. This can contribute to post-traumatic stress disorder, when vivid recollections return well after the event, evoking the initial horror. Classic signs include panic attacks, the avoidance of people or reminders of the incident, and flashbacks or nightmares.

These physical reactions compound psychological burdens such as guilt. Extreme stress can spawn other symptoms of distress, from insomnia to depression. Many mental health experts believe journalists should debrief as early as possible after the traumatic experience, so that disturbing thoughts don’t fester. This could be with colleagues at the hotel bar, or a couple of sessions with a therapist. The important thing is to process it. “It’s like carrying around a bowling ball if you don’t deal with it,” says Frank Smyth, the Washington, D.C., representative of the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Judith Matloff , a writer living in New York, teaches at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. She worked for Reuters from 1983 to 1994.

Liked this story? Get top stories in your inbox each week from Media and Technology! Sign up now »