of duty In the line


Louise Tickle on the sometimes devastating impact that reporting disturbing stories can have


T


his time last year, I was hardly sleeping. My mind circled frenetically; terrifying scenarios filled the darkness. The various ways a man could torture and kill a woman or a child. Seeing my own kids dying. The buzzing


mental discomfort of trying to work out, at 3am, how to best tell the story of a woman whose baby had been removed by social services at birth. When panic started to swell into my daytimes, I went to bed, unwritten features – and unearned money – hanging over my head like a cloud of doom. Life felt precarious. And not just other people’s. Selfishly, my children’s. Mine. “You’re exhausted,” said my GP after I’d sobbingly explained that I’d spent two years writing about child poverty and sexual abuse, another two focused on domestic abuse and 12 months on children being taken into care. My anxiety was compounded because financially too I was


teetering: after trying to do bigger, hopefully more impactful stories, my bank balance showed that investigations into troubling social issues tend to take longer than freelance fees account for. I felt guilty and frightened that I was putting my family at financial risk. And yet this was the work I wanted to do. “I’d also say,” my doctor continued, “that you have a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder.” I was shocked, but he explained that it was entirely possible


to develop PTSD related to events experienced by other people. It has taken me a while to accept this, and I still feel a sense of “how can I be making such a fuss when others are really suffering?”


There is widespread awareness that reporting from conflict


zones can result in journalists developing PTSD. Vicarious trauma is “a real phenomenon”, says former journalist Gavin Rees, now director of Dart Centre Europe, which works with journalists covering traumatic events. Journalists immersed over long periods of time with people who have lived through extremes of exploitation, violence, fear, grief and loss are particularly at risk of PTSD. “The lack of understanding is partly because our perspective


16 | theJournalist


as journalists is focused on other people,” Rees explains. “It’s also about industry norms of objectivity, and thinking that we should be a detached observer. That’s not how the real world works though; if we’re interviewing people who’ve experienced profound betrayal and don’t feel safe and secure, it’s not surprising that those feelings transfer over to journalists.” Neuroscience has shown that when you talk to someone


who is in distress, the same regions of your brain light up as your interviewee’s, he explains. While it’s not of the same magnitude, the problem for journalists is that they “may be talking to many people over long periods of time, so the distress response starts to add up”. Annie Kelly has edited the Guardian’s Modern Day Slavery project for three years. Responsible for commissioning, editing and reporting long-form investigations into the worst extremes of human exploitation, last autumn she found herself experiencing a full-blown panic attack while cycling into work. It had, she now realises, been coming for months. “As the stories we ran got bigger and harder, I didn’t


appreciate how emotionally demanding it was getting,” she says. “My husband was working on breaking news stories in Ukraine and Syria for a major news channel doing what I suppose I felt was the ‘real’ journalism, so me holding the fort at home with two young children and keeping my career going just didn’t seem to compare.” As well as being embroiled in the detail of every story she’d commissioned, Kelly was responsible for the wellbeing and safety of reporters across the globe in potentially dangerous situations. On top of that came the constant stress of litigation by big corporates and, as a result, her three-day-a- week job – realistically a full-time role – started to leak into the rest of her week. Then she hit a run of stories that involved reading and


watching hours of distressing video testimony. “There was this one little boy who’d been trafficked to the UK, just about my daughter’s age, and, in the week before these panic attacks, this little boy was actually in the room with me at night,” Kelly recalls. “Combined with the pressures at home and my husband working long hours and travelling, it just all built up.”


LORENZO ROSSI / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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