News from Hell before Breakfast: Journalists, War Trauma and PTSD
"I hate newspapermen. They come into camp and pick up their camp rumors and print them as facts. I regard them as spies, which, in truth, they are. If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast." -- attributed, perhaps erroneously, to Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman.
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A different quote:
"On Thursday, June 26th, I witnessed the immediate aftermath of an Al-Qaeda suicide bomb attack. Several dozen people lost their lives... children, old men, civilians, police, and military men. The scene was horrific beyond words, even for someone like me who has a fairly high threshold for such things.
I found it nearly impossible to look through the viewfinder. What I saw was abhorrently graphic, yet far too important for the world to ignore. I present images that provide an uncensored view of a terrible event, and some small measure of dignity to those who lost their lives."
-- Zoriah, international humanitarian photographer, whose gripping images from that event were later censored by the U.S. military, and he was evicted from his embed assignment with the Marines. (The link to the post where he talks about those images, and shows them, is here.)
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PTSD from being a combat journalist of photographer, embedded or otherwise: Not everyone who's exposed to combat trauma develops PTSD, as we know. Recently, Kimberly Dozier, CBS correspondent and author of Breathing the Fire, says she didn't develop it from her horrific near-death incident in Iraq in May of 2006, though ironically -- according to Dozier -- almost everyone she interacts with believes thatshe must have. (See article to that effect by Dozier, linked here.) However...many do; and for others, the signs and symptoms take time to manifest themselves.
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Journalists bear witness, both to some of the most savage atrocities of wartime, though without the training and the mindset of combatants, and also to the suffering of the survivors, military and civilian. Says one photographer who served in Vietnam:
It has been very difficult for me [to recount some of his memories from the past] as it has brought back many of the horrible nightmares that I had thought that I had finally put away. It did get them out in the open and off my chest so to speak and now my family now knows why I sometimes have to take those walks out into the woods alone to just get away. Hard to explain. I do have severe survival guilt as I have lost far to many friends in combat in up close and personal confrontations. I have many photos of me smiling and yes there were many good times. However; there were enough bad times to more than compensate for the good ones. I have learned to cope with this new world that I came home to only because I still feel a great need to help my fellow veterans. We 'Nam veterans are all but forgotten in my eyes.
Two significant resources: Dr. Anthony Feinstein's work, and the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.
Two excellent books:
Dangerous Lives: War, and the Men and Women Who Report It, by Anthony Feinstein (2002); and Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War, by Anthony Feinstein. (2006). (Recommended by Jonathan Shay, M.D., Ph.D., noted PTSD expert.) Shay wrote: "the first and only book about the occupational [psychological] hazards of being a war correspondent. Published in Canada, will come out in the US next year from Johns Hopkins UP with a new chapter on embeds."
Dr. Anthony Feinstein is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto and a neuropsychiatrist at Sunnybrook and Women's College Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. He is an expert on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in war journalists. Feinstein received a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship to pursue his research. Dr. Anthony Feinstein's bio is linked here. Much better bio, linked here.
For reporters: War, Journalism and Stress: The Self-Assessment Test, linked here. (General description of the test, linked here.)
What Feinstein has to say:
More than anything, says Feinstein, he’s learned that, “War is not good for journalists. They suffer from it.”
Specifically, they suffer post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse and anxiety disorders. One in five journalists, over the course of a long (15-plus-year) career, endures significant PTSD, says Feinstein. That means, among other things, bad dreams, flashbacks, numbness, an overly sensitive startle response and an inability to get close to others emotionally. One in four experiences depression. “And a number drink very heavily as well,” says Feinstein, “but I don’t know how many, because I never know for sure what they’re telling me.”
The most surprising revelation of the research for Feinstein? “I didn’t realize that the journalists were in such great danger. You see them when they report the news: cool, collected, with everything seemingly going on behind them. But these people are really right in the middle of it all.”
He is particularly sympathetic to still photographers. More than anyone, he says, these professionals have no choice but to get into the thick of things to do their jobs well.
The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, located on the campus of the University of Washington in Seattle, is a particularly good, targeted resource for journalists about reporting and trauma: both externally reporting, and internally experiencing trauma from reporting in war zones. Click here to look through their extensive offerings, which are really superb.
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Who's the handsome young man in the photo?
That's Robert W. "Grif" Griffin. Griffin says, "I was a combat photographer with the 1st Cavalry Division Airmobile from 1966 to 1968 and 1970. I was in country [in Vietnam] as a photographer from 1966 to 1968, and back again in 1970." (He was shot down near Quan Loi in 1970.) He adds that he "spent 20 years in the Army mostly as a photojournalist/motion picture and still photographer."
According to Griffin, "the photographer who took the photo is Jere L. Smith, a fellow combat photographer and a Specialist E5 at the time. We were both assigned to the 13th Signal Battalion, which was part of the 1st Cavalry Division Airmobile." At the time the photo was taken, Griffin was duplicating some slides for his Command for a Division briefing that was to take place in several locations at the same time: hence, the dupes.
