Journalists are candidates for Secondary Traumatic Stress
Disorder, an empathic response that affects us, therapists
included, when our professional detachment is
overwhelmed by certain life events.
Images of dead children leave an indelible mark. Firefighters,
who would rather not admit that they have tender feelings,
find themselves vulnerable to the haunting memory of a
burnt child or the sight of a tiny form in a body bag.
The sheer numbers of unexpected dead, in one place, will
penetrate the defenses of hardened rescue workers. Plane
crashes rank among the most difficult assignments for
American Red Cross workers who normally handle floods,
earthquakes and fires. At an air disaster, there is a
concentration of death images that few doctors, nurses
or ambulance drivers have ever seen.
Writing about journalists covering Rwanda, Roger Rosenblatt
mused: "Most journalists react in three stages. In the
first stage, when they are young, they respond to atrocities
with shock and revulsion and perhaps a twinge of guilty
excitement that they are seeing something others will
never see: life at its dreadful extremes. In the second
stage, the atrocities become familiar and repetitive,
and journalists begin to sound like Spiro Agnew: If you
have seen one loss of dignity and spirit, you've seen
them all. Too many journalists get stuck in this stage.
They get bogged down in the routineness of the suffering.
Embittered, spiteful and inadequate to their work, they
curse out their bosses back home for not according them
respect; they hate the people on whom they report. Worst
of all, they don't allow themselves to enter the third
stage in which everything gets sadder and wiser, worse
and strangely better." (The New Republic, June 6, 1994,
p. 16)
In one or two decades, PTSD will be universally recognized,
de-stigmatized, and well treated. To be dazed at first,
then haunted by horrible memories and made anxious and
avoidance is to be part of the human family. When deliberate,
criminal cruelty is the cause of PTSD, we often neglect
the victim and become captives of collective outrage,
focusing attention on crime and criminality and those
who are to blame.
By discussing PTSD, we disarm PTSD. We do not prevent
it, but we minimize its degrading, diminishing effects.
We help victims become survivors. We help survivors regain
dignity and respect.
