What Would it Take to Transform Journalists' Mental Health?
Newsroom leaders must do their trauma work; and a virtual "First Aid Kit" for colleagues.
Resonant World #86
News organisations can be exhilarating and enlightening places to work.
Like any institutions, they can also be brutal, unthinking and cruel.
I saw plenty of light and shadow in my years working as a correspondent for some of the world’s biggest media companies.
And I still harbour deep affection and respect for my former colleagues who continue to do courageous work within their walls.
That’s why I was delighted to take part in a panel at the MediaStrong symposium in London today, which brought together industry figures to explore how best to protect journalists’ mental health, and integrate a deeper understanding of trauma into our reporting.
The brainchild of journalist and author Leona O’Neill, there were delegates and speakers from the BBC, Sky News, ITV News, Channel 4, The John Schofield Trust, Dart Centre Europe, AP, Reuters, CNN, and a host of other news organisations and universities, as well as my friend James Scurry’s amazing mental health nonprofit Safely Held Spaces, which is among the organisers.
This was much more than a seminar.
The depth, rawness and honesty of stories of trauma and moral injury shared by veteran journalists gave the space a quality of the sacred.
I believe the impact of what occured today will ripple outwards, with hugely beneficial effects for the industry, those who work in it, and all of us exposed to its outputs.
Line in the Sand
A few years ago, I would have approached the topic of journalist mental health primarily through the lens of better support for individual journalists who’ve suffered trauma.
An archetypal example could be my friend and former Reuters colleague Dean Yates, whose journey through post-traumatic stress and moral injury is recounted in his memoir Line in the Sand. (For a clip of my interview with Dean for the Collective Trauma Summit 2022, click here). (Resonant World#5: Applying the Lessons).
Awareness is now growing that it’s not just war correspondents who can suffer psychological injury. Think of early career video editors poring over horrific social media footage from war zones; data journalists combing for months through court transcripts of killings by police officers; health reporters suffering burnout comparable to frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic; or climate reporters overwhelmed by constant immersion in the horror of a collapsing biopshere. (Not to mention the toll of workplace bullying — still a sad reality in some corners of the industry).
But we need to adopt an even wider perspective.
News organisations can’t afford to think of mental health support as something to extend to people once they’ve suffered some kind of “disorder” as a result of their work.
That framing creates an immediate separation, places the locus of the problem in the individual, and implies that the newsroom is divided into a majority who don’t have a mental health problem, and a small minority who do.
Thinking in these terms is a comforting illusion for management — and harmful to those who are suffering.
Collective Trauma
My immersive work in collective healing spaces over the last few years has taught me how the unresolved past from our own early lives; previous generations of our family systems; our cultural sphere; and our national histories shape our present reality in ways we often barely recognise.
Training under the facilitator Thomas Hübl and his team, I’ve had an opportunity to explore with hundreds of other people how the lasting imprints of historical processes from World War Two and the Holocaust to slavery, racism and colonialism, to name a few, live on in us in the present. (Resonant World#79: Why I’m Training as a Collective Trauma Integration Facilitator).
I’ve traced some of the fragments of collective and inter-generational trauma that I carry, and I’ve witnessed many others do the same.
The results have been mind-blowing.
I’ve realised how far these complex trauma legacies limit our perceptions of ourselves and other people; our ways of relating; and our ideas about what’s possible, in ways I could not previously have imagined.
I’ve seen how much of the undigested past was playing out in my day-to-day interactions, my assumptions about others, and in my intimate relationships.
And I’ve had to confront how little I’d really learned about the deep psychological drivers of the chaos in our world, despite my many years as a correspondent overseas.
Outer Mirrors Inner
After undergoing this process, it’s impossible to experience the world in quite the same way.
It becomes self-evident that the dysfunction we see today at every scale is a reflection of unresolved trauma, both individual and collective.
And this dysfunction is not happening “out there” — separate from us.
These trauma fields live inside of us, like an invisible matrix, interweaving and interpenetrating our minds and bodies in a pattern of infinite complexity, exerting multi-layered, kaleidoscopic forms of influence at every level.
Our news organisations do not stand apart.
Media companies are built of the very same “trauma architecture” — to use Thomas Hübl’s phrase — that underpins our modern societies, and the social, economic and political systems that are driving our headlong dash towards ecological collapse.
This might sound overwhelming to contemplate.
But this realisation is liberating.
Because once we perceive the extent to which we’re caught in these trauma matrices, we can begin the work of dissolving them.
Leaders: Do Your Trauma Work
Practically speaking, this means that we need to go beyond thinking about newsroom mental health in terms of providing better access to therapy for journalists, or running anti-stigma campaigns, even though these are also necessary.
The real transformation will begin when the senior leadership teams of news organisations begin to embrace deep healing work themselves.
Imagine if the top 40 or 50 editors, journalists and executives at big media companies underwent just a week-long process to support one another to begin to integrate more of their individual, collective and inter-generational trauma.
In the words of Amy Elizabeth Fox, chief executive of Mobius Group, which runs such transformational processes for corporate leaders:
“In our programmes, we often do an exercise in which we ask executives to make a list, a rigorous inventory one might say, of how they numb themselves. What are the small behavioural hacks, and large addictions, that they use to keep outside from their own felt experience? And you get a very long list. You get a list that ranges from things we think of as normal everyday life, like addiction to social media, overwork, distraction, trivialisation of attention, to things that we take gravely but don’t tend to treat in corporate intervention: addiction, unethical behaviour, lack of purpose.”
Fox continues:
“Then we talk about the costs of that numbing. And people say things that are beyond poignant, perhaps to themselves for the first time: I lose my sense of myself; I don’t pay attention to my family enough; I don’t know what matters to me; my heart feels flat and bored; I don’t have access to my own creativity and spark of life.”
That “creativity and spark of life” is buried under layers of trauma.
Fox says it doesn’t take long to bring participants in Mobius programmes into contact with deeper dimensions of themselves.
“They come on Sunday night, they’re scared, they’re formal, they’re usually pretty numb. They’re pretty routinised in how they interact with each other. By Thursday or Friday, they are singing, they are dancing, they are cradling each other. It’s a very quick move from frozen to love, and I think there’s a tremendous amount of hope in that.”
Can media organisations beome agents of the kind of transformational change we’ll need to re-imagine our political, social and economic life in the hard years ahead?
Even if the inertia in these systems can feel crushing at times, there are glimmers of something new becoming visible, including at today’s MediaStrong gathering, where soul-bearing presentations by journalists have shown how far the profession has come in terms of its willingness to consider the inner world.
If the people at the top of these organisations also begin do their own deep trauma integration work, then the aperture for change will widen further.
That won’t be enough, by itself, to change the systems these companies serve. But without that kind of leadership, talk of better mental health support can only go so far.
Journalist Mental Health ‘First Aid Kit’
Some years ago, I created this series of online vidoes aimed at journalists suffering some form of crisis. Now seems like an opportune moment to share it again:
Video 1 – Introduction
Video 1 – Talking about the dark stuff.
Video 2 – You really aren’t alone.
Video 3 – The tyranny of the ‘inner journalist’.
Video 4 – Start from where you are.
Video 5 – Reach out.
Video 6 – Give yourself an actual break.
Video 7 – A crisis is a green light to explore new ways of being.
Video 8 – Finding the right support.
Note from the Editor: A labour of love, Resonant World is written in the gaps between work I get paid to do, notably editing investigations at nonprofit climate news service DeSmog. It’s a huge boost when people become paid subscribers, and support of any amount affirms that my mission to support the global community of practitioners engaged in supporting people to integrate individual, inter-generational and collective trauma has value. Thank you!