When Reuters staff talk to me about stress and trauma, I often get a variation on the following: “I would never compare my experiences to yours …”

It happened frequently when I met folks in London, Paris, Brussels and Frankfurt last November during my first trip as head of mental health and wellbeing strategy. It happens in email exchanges with Reuters journalists. It happens when I talk to staff on the phone.

I understand why people compare because I used to do it myself.

It’s not helpful. Don’t get into the comparison game. You might play down your symptoms. It might stop you seeking help. You could chip away at your self-worth. We all experience stress and trauma differently. We all have our breaking point.

This is especially important for staff who don’t work in hostile environments, witness human suffering and deal with distressing imagery. Acknowledge the stress of covering financial markets, companies and economies whether you are in text, pix, TV, graphics or data. Acknowledge the stress of trying to be first and the best. As I’ve said to many colleagues, I would have preferred working in Baghdad any day to covering the Fed, the ECB or the BOJ. I don’t think I could have handled that sort of pressure.

“No person’s suffering can be measured against any other person’s suffering. It can be extremely damaging if anyone makes comparisons,” wrote American psychiatrist Jonathan Shay in his 1994 book, Achilles in Vietnam.

OK, Shay was writing about American soldiers psychologically damaged by the Vietnam War. But I believe there is a message for all of us in what Shay says about veterans: “Combat veterans frequently doubt that they are worthy of treatment, knowing other vets who are worse off now or went through worse than they did. Many survivors of appalling trauma obstruct their own healing by placing themselves in hierarchies of suffering, usually to their own disadvantage.”

In mid-2016 I was gripped by symptoms of PTSD and moral injury.

I’d been off work for a few months. I’d think of Reuters journalists such as Samia Nakhoul, Mike Georgy and Goran Tomasevic. I’d say to myself: ‘Samia was nearly killed in Baghdad, Mike was kidnapped in Baghdad, Goran, well, Goran lived on the frontline. And yet they are still working!’

Part of the problem was I compared my experiences to what they had done. They had all spent decades covering wars. While I spent a fair chunk of time in Iraq, I was never shot at. I only did two weeks embedded with the U.S. military (late 2003). I never had any really close calls. I couldn’t fathom why my symptoms were so bad, why I couldn’t work. It made me feel worthless.

A month later, I entered the Ward 17 psychiatric unit in Melbourne for the first time. I was initially convinced there must be others more deserving of the expensive treatment than I was. By deserving, I mean people who had suffered more than I had.

At that point I hadn’t gotten my head around why I felt such guilt and shame over the deaths of Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen and driver Saeed Chmagh in Baghdad in 2007 when I was the bureau chief. I didn’t understand the impact that the cumulative trauma of other events had had on me. I had also totally underestimated the stress of being a bureau chief (Iraq) and a deputy bureau chief (Jerusalem and Jakarta) as well as a top news editor (Singapore).

It’s important to note that routine cumulative stresses can contribute to the risk of developing post-traumatic stress disorder. While ordinary daily stress cannot cause PTSD, it can erode your resilience to larger unexpected shocks, says CiC, our 24/7 global counselling service.

“Stress can mean different things to different people. Any given situation can feel tense and pressurised for one person, while the next might find it stimulating and exciting. Stress is determined not just by events in the outside world, but by how each individual perceives them,” CiC says.

Last September I was chatting on the phone with Andy Cawthorne, the Reuters bureau chief for the Andean region, which includes crisis-prone Venezuela. Andy was coming to grips with the fact he was burned out, a story he eloquently shared in this blog.

As we spoke, Andy used a variation of the line “I would never compare my experiences to yours …” I said something like: “Mate, you’ve had to cope with 25 years of accumulated trauma/stress from covering conflict, natural disasters, as well as the stress of living in places such as Caracas and Nairobi for long periods of time.”

Andy said he got it.

The next day he wrote me an email saying he had just contacted CiC to seek counselling. He then referred to his own journey as “incomparable” to mine and even a “bit trivial” before noting that “we’re not in the comparison game as we discussed”.

I gave him a gentle rap on the knuckles. 

Interestingly, Andy told me recently that since he’d begun talking openly about his mental struggles, some folks had played down their own experiences compared to his when chatting with him. Andy’s also had to rap a few knuckles.

U.S. researcher and best-selling author Brene Brown, whose TED talk on vulnerability is one of the five most ever watched, has an interesting take on the “comparison game”.

In her excellent 2017 book Braving the Wilderness, Brown mentions that she has interviewed people who have survived serious trauma ranging from the loss of a child to genocide as part of her research over the past 15 years.

She says there is no contradiction in feeling joy about our own lives and raging at injustice and suffering in the world. The key to joy is practicing gratitude, Brown writes. She says that when the listener is grateful for what he or she has, they will understand the magnitude of what the other person has lost.

“I’ve learned that the more we diminish our own pain or rank it compared to what others have survived, the less empathetic we are to everyone,” Brown writes.

Dean Yates was a journalist, bureau chief and editor for Reuters for more than 26 years. He has reported extensively on war, conflict and natural disasters in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Dean was diagnosed with PTSD in March 2016. He has been admitted three times to the Ward 17 psychiatric unit in Melbourne. He also served as head of journalist mental health and wellbeing strategy at Reuters.

This blog post first circulated internally on July 9, 2018.

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