I can’t recall many conversations with colleagues in the past year about being exposed to what we’d traditionally call frontline trauma – covering a war, an earthquake or a bomb attack. Vicarious trauma on the other hand, I’ve had many of those.

The word vicarious can mean indirect, second-hand or an experience that results from watching or listening to something. Reuters journalists can be affected by vicarious trauma in many ways:

— Working with traumatic images or footage;
— Monitoring social media/user generated content (UGC);
— Repeated reporting of traumatic events from the office;
— Reporting on traumatic court trials, involving sexual abuse or acts of terrorism for example;
— Interviewing, photographing or filming the survivors of horrific events.

New Zealand correspondent Charlotte Greenfield, who did a reporting stint in Kabul in January, flew to Christchurch on March 15 after a gunman killed 50 people at two mosques. Police had blocked access to the mosques by the time she arrived. Charlotte interviewed survivors at a nearby community college, where a victims’ centre had been established. “I didn’t see a drop of blood, but I spoke to dozens of people who witnessed this bloodbath. That affects you,” Greenfield told me a month later. “Then you’re trying to work out what is normal stress and what is not. What is the difference between stress, sheer emotion and exhaustion.”

Vicarious trauma is most commonly associated with editors and producers who work with distressing images or footage as well as monitors of social media.

Research shows that images of war, violence and destruction can cause emotional distress and psychological damage. Vicarious trauma can be a different route to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but it’s not a different condition. The latest edition (2013) of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5) published by the American Psychiatric Association states that professionals such as journalists can develop PTSD from repeated exposure to distressing material via electronic means if it’s part of their job.

One of the biggest obstacles to seeking help is shame. Journalists might think that because they’re not in the field, witnessing events close-up, they shouldn’t have any adverse reactions. They might also question how they could experience trauma given what people on the screen in front of them have gone through.

That’s a natural human reaction but we need to change that mindset if we are to manage the risks of vicarious trauma. One person working hard to do so is Hazel Baker, global head of UGC news gathering, based in London. The monitoring of social media is integral to our coverage of news, especially big breaking stories. Hazel oversees a team of 11 full-time social media producers working in London, Singapore, Poland, Mexico and Jordan. Their job is to source, verify and rights-clear material captured by eyewitnesses at the scene of news events.

Hazel says her team knows that every day some of their colleagues are in the field, covering difficult and dangerous stories. “The idea that those of us working in comfortable offices may also feel trauma, just through watching these stories unfold on our screens, can seem a trivial risk. However, a growing body of evidence suggests PTSD or PTSD-related symptoms can arise through repeated and/or extreme exposure to imagery of a traumatic event,” she says. “We encourage all colleagues to seek support, and to feel no shame whatsoever in doing so, if they feel they are experiencing symptoms of vicarious trauma.”

Reuters’ guidelines for dealing with graphic UGC content can be found here.

Last year I did conference calls with various editorial teams to explain what was happening on the mental health front. One was with the global graphics team. Graphics news editor Christine Chan, based in New York, talked about the emotional toll of doing repeated graphics of mass school shootings in the United States. Until that moment, I’d never thought about the potential for graphics journalists to experience vicarious trauma. But it makes sense. Folks like Christine pore over images to create their work.

Robert MacMillan supervises the teams that package text, images, graphics and videos for Reuters News websites, online media clients and readers of Eikon front pages and newsletters. He has been reporting or editing news since 1993.

Sitting at a desk and reviewing harrowing images, video and text for use on Dotcom – often dozens at a time and all day every day – taxes the mind, Robert told me.

“You recoil at what you see and deal with complicated emotions and ask questions that can feel ghoulish. Which image is the most awful yet effective? Which one is great but won't work because there's 'too much blood' or 'too many severed body parts?' Which picture would best illustrate this rape? There are other troubling thoughts: 'why should I feel this? I wasn't the one out there gathering this reportage. That should be me doing this work instead of wasting my time at a desk. Who am I to complain?' Let's be clear: the horrible things we work with touch us too, and there is no shame in speaking about it to colleagues or to the people who are there to help us through this strange territory.”

Helen Long, Reuters’ video operations manager based in London, has experienced plenty of trauma first hand as well as found herself in perilous situations during a long career in journalism. She’s witnessed death at close quarters, been shot at, bombed, mugged, detained and roughed up. But none of that compares to the horror of editing beheading videos from the Middle East, Helen said. After 11 years of editing such footage, Helen decided in 2015 that she couldn’t watch them anymore.

“The chanting at the start of each video is enough to release gallons of adrenaline and cortisol. My chest immediately tightens, and my breathing quickens, at which point I no longer feel safe inside my own skin. And that’s BEFORE the execution, which is almost always cruelly drawn out for maximum effect,” Helen wrote to me in an email.

“I can’t watch movies, dramas, documentaries or anything that features knives. The colour orange is synonymous with murder. So are choking noises. There is rarely a day that goes by without some horrific image bursting unbidden into my mind. And then there are the periodic run of nightmares.”

My sense is that vicarious trauma is at least an equal, if not a greater risk to our staff, than what we would have called frontline trauma in the days of say the Iraq War. That is because of the sheer number of Reuters journalists potentially exposed to distressing imagery and footage thanks to technology and social media. In addition, there are no more major wars, at least for now. Instead, we have massacres in places like peaceful New Zealand. These sorts of events were once rare. Not anymore. I’m not trying to play down the trauma our journalists who work in places such as Baghdad, Kabul or Caracas are exposed to. That is still very real. I just want my colleagues who experience vicarious trauma to understand that no one will judge them if they are suffering and need to seek help.

Following are excellent resources on vicarious trauma:

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma has guidelines for dealing with traumatic imagery here and here. Reuters contributed to those guidelines.

This is an excellent guide to vicarious trauma for journalists, editors and news organisations by First Draft.

This podcast explains why it’s important for newsrooms to be aware of vicarious trauma and its potential impact.

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. Dean also served as head of journalist mental health and wellbeing strategy at Reuters.

This blog post first circulated internally on May 22, 2019.

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