Journalists must deal with traumatic experiences

(An edited version of this piece was published in 'The Irish Journalist' December 2014)

David Bolton is an internationally recognised trauma expert, who has spoken at several meetings of the NUJ’s Derry North West Ireland Branch. He spoke to ‘The Irish Journalist’ because he believes the work of journalists is of “utmost value” in helping victims – and that some journalists suffer trauma-related conditions because of their work.

Such conditions develop when people undergo life-threatening or appalling experiences. Afterwards they, and those near them, are in danger of developing serious psychological problems.

“One of them is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but people can also experience trauma-related depression and other anxiety disorders,” Bolton said. “These can be quite transient, and be overcome fairly rapidly, but are often likely to persist for some people. We know for example that 15% of people involved in traumatic events in Northern Ireland have gone on to develop Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. And then if you add to that depression and other disorders you’re clocking up quite a number of people.” He stressed that “people suffer almost identical outcomes and risks when exposed to non-Troubles related traumatic events such as road traffic accidents, sexual assault, being held hostage in a bank robbery, or indeed things like a sudden and serious illness.”

Through work, journalists meet sufferers. “One of the first reactions a journalist might get in approaching someone is a refusal to take part in an interview,” Bolton said. “That may well be because the very thing the person is trying to keep at bay is the last thing they want to talk to a journalist about – or indeed to anyone else, a doctor or whoever. And one of the most powerful symptoms of traumatic reactions is a desire not to deal with it, to keep it at bay, and that can be done by avoidance, by drinking a lot of alcohol, by working too hard, playing too hard.”

Journalists can help because, like therapists, they tell the person it is safe to speak about a terrible experience. “One of the things a journalist might want to do as part of their care of a person who has been speaking to them is to suggest that they seek help and maybe even suggest that they go and see their doctor,” Bolton said. “And they might even want to say that ‘in the course of our conversation it seems to me that this is a major worry to you and you are deeply upset by this experience and maybe it would be a good thing if you went and saw your own doctor’.”

Bolton believes the work of journalists is “of utmost value. For the individual, it can be the beginning of doing something about their distress. But there’s a wider role here, and the wider role is that, through the telling of stories of traumatic experiences and their consequences, people out there who have had similar experiences, and have yet to seek help, and have yet to deal with their own experiences, are reading material and are hearing people speaking about a thing they can identify with. So what happens is that a person’s terrifying and lonely experience becomes one that is shared by others and is normalised in that way.” The rest of society benefits “because it allows us to be much more sympathetic as a society to the needs of those who have been through these types of experiences.”

Because of their work, journalists also suffer. Journalists are “a bit like medical workers, health care workers, undertakers, who are there to pick up the pieces, to reflect the stories, but who are not thought of as being human and are seen as being somehow immune from the consequences of these experiences.”

He explained that people often don’t make the link between a traumatic experience and their reaction “particularly if the reaction comes some time after the experience. Whatever kind of behaviours are going on they may not be able to link back to that particular event. If journalists find that they are not themselves, then one of the useful questions they might wish to ask is – is there something about the recent past that may somehow be linked to how I’m feeling at the moment. I’m down, I don’t have the energy I had, I’m not the person I was. Or maybe more dramatic than that I’m having these nightmares, flashbacks to something I don’t fully understand.”

The feedback at NUJ meetings has impressed Bolton. Members were interested in the general issue, and able to connect it to their lives. “Even though I was conveying how members of the public react in certain situations, many of the people in the meetings were saying ‘I’ve had those experiences in my work, in reporting events, being a witness to events’,” he said.

He said journalists, like other sufferers, should seek help rather than “walk into darkness. Often people feel highly isolated, alone, the only people who are suffering this problem because it’s so odd and so perverse that nobody else could ever feel like this or be like this. And yet when people came to us and we said ‘Here’s what the problem is. You’ve got Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or you’re having a depression in reaction to a traumatic event,’ that information alone is highly reassuring for people, and was the basis from which people began to recover and make progress.”

His final recommendation to journalists is to use clear language. “I would urge journalists to use the phrase ‘traumatic stress’, ‘traumatic experience’, ‘traumatic reaction’, so it’s a bit more precise, rather than just the word ‘trauma’,” he said.

Bolton’s expertise in trauma comes from experience. A social worker, his work on trauma began with victims of the Enniskillen bomb of 1987. After the Omagh bomb of 1998, he headed up the trauma team. He is currently a researcher with the Initiative for Conflict-Related Trauma. He is impressed by the work the NUJ in Ireland is doing, most recently the Journalist Safety Conference last year, seeing us as serious in facing the issue.