Covering the Bali bombings: Was it a predictor of PTSD? Dean Yates

Surfers join hands to remember the victims of the Bali bombings at Kuta beach on Oct. 12, 2012. REUTERS/Beawiharta

Those of us who cover traumatic events try to stay detached. Our job is to bear witness and report. I thought I did this better than most.

What I know now is that more than 14 years ago, I crossed the line while covering the Bali bombings. I felt such ambivalence I couldn’t do a key part of my job. Could this have made me more vulnerable to trauma in later years? Might it help explain why I developed PTSD? Is this ambivalence something journalists need to talk about?

It was late on a Saturday night in Jakarta on October 12, 2002 when our stringer in Bali called me at home. I was the Reuters deputy bureau chief for Indonesia. There was panic in his voice. He said there’d been a big explosion along the Kuta Beach bar strip. He was there.

I asked what he could see. Headless bodies, he said.

Within hours the world learned that militants had bombed two nightclubs in an attack that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

I still recall landing at Bali early the following morning. The beaches looked beautiful. Bali was as it should be.

But this was no ordinary day. Foreign tourists were already at the airport, trying to leave. This was the biggest story I’d ever covered. I went over in my mind what I needed to do: 1) Go to the bomb site 2) Talk to witnesses 3) Get details on the investigation 4) Visit Sanglah hospital, where the dead and wounded had been taken.

All that remained of the Sari nightclub was burnt wood and debris. One of Asia’s most vibrant tourist strips was eerily quiet. I could feel evil in the air. Police hadn’t cordoned off the area, and as I walked around the site, my foot disturbed a piece of wood amid the ashes. What was underneath has haunted me since: a bloodied hand, palm down. I later told my wife Mary there was a watch on the severed wrist but I don’t remember that now. I had never seen what a bomb could do to a human being.

It wasn’t long before that hand became an invasive visitor in my head.

From the bombsite, I took a taxi to Sanglah hospital. It had been overwhelmed by the number of dead and wounded. As I walked in, medical staff wheeled a foreign tourist past me on a gurney. His face was badly burnt. A sheet covered the rest of his body. He stared up. Many distraught foreigners were there. I froze. I shouldn't be here, I thought. I can’t intrude given what these people are going through. I didn’t even know how to ask a question. I knew scores of bodies had been placed on the ground in a courtyard at the hospital morgue. I couldn’t bring myself to go there.

I left after about 10 minutes, catching a taxi back to the site of the bombing. I knew my job had been to talk to survivors, to the wounded, to their families and to describe their shock and devastation. I have buried deep inside me the shame I felt as the taxi took me back to Kuta Beach. How could I call myself a journalist? I didn’t even tell Mary. Another Reuters reporter, Jo Collins, also an Australian, flew in from Jakarta soon after. She spent many hours over the next several days at the hospital. Jo told me a few months ago that she felt like she was intruding. But she did her job.

I think part of my problem was I’d never worked in Australia as a journalist. I didn’t know how to approach people from my own country who were in such pain. At that point, I’d spent 10 years working as a journalist, all of it in Asia.  It’s not that Indonesians weren’t victims. In fact, 38 Indonesians were killed.

What I have been trying to work out in recent months is this: Had my ambivalence that day made me more susceptible to the effects of trauma, and eventually PTSD?

In her seminal book, Trauma and Recovery, American psychiatrist Judith Herman says: “When the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict.”

Cait McMahon is a psychologist who heads up the Dart Center’s Asia-Pacific programme. Cait has explored the nexus of journalism and trauma since the mid-1980s.

She says her research suggests journalists need to be crystal clear about what they’re doing when reporting traumatic events because of what she calls the ‘journalist/person dilemma’.

“Journalists would say to me: ‘I didn’t know whether I should act as a journalist or a person in a certain situation’. What they were saying was: ‘should I be objective and detached and observe or should I get in there and do something?’” Cait told me recently.

“The person who chose to respond as a journalist and the person who was quite clear in responding as a person had reasonably low post trauma reactions. The ones who were confused about their role were the ones with the highest post trauma reactions.”

“It seems it doesn’t matter which way you go as long as you’re clear about it and feel good about your decision. It’s the ambivalence that can be your undoing.”

It’s not always this clear cut but I’ve heard stories from other journalists that support this idea. In terms of my own story, I wonder now whether my ambivalence that day was a trauma turning point that I missed.

Since being diagnosed with PTSD in March 2016, most of my psychotherapy has focused on Iraq. I’d paid little attention to Bali until earlier this year when Mary brought it up. Mary said I’d begun to shut down emotionally after the Bali bombings. Emotional numbness is a key symptom of PTSD.

My youngest son Harry was born in Singapore roughly five weeks after the attacks. I had flown in from Jakarta the night before Harry’s birth. I left the hospital to return to a hotel a few hours after he was born. I’d told Mary I was tired.

That was in stark contrast to when we’d brought our adopted son Patrick home from a Jakarta orphanage the year before. We’d put him into bed with us and stared at him all night. We couldn’t believe how lucky we were.

That hand in the ruins of the Sari nightclub would be the first of many images to intrude into my head in the years to come. The ambivalence I felt inside Sanglah hospital would return, in Indonesia’s Aceh province during the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. But this time, I think I recognised it for what it was and rather than confuse and hinder me, it gave me extraordinary passion to bear witness.

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. Since May 2017, Dean has been head of journalist mental health and wellbeing strategy at Reuters.

This blog was first circulated internally on June 19, 2017.

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