Journalists and mental health professionals meeting at South East Europe's biggest-ever international trauma conference explored the need for better understanding and contact between their two professions.

Brought together by the Dart Centre and the European Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, a Zagreb workshop of regional journalists and psychotherapists, psychiatrists and psychologists from Croatia and across Europe looked at how professional trauma expertise can be better brought to public attention.

The workshop, led by Dart Centre Europe's Director Mark Brayne and Northern Ireland psychiatrist Oscar Daly, was held at the first-ever major conference of the ESTSS to be held in the former Communist half of Europe, with some 250 mental health professionals and a small team of regional journalists (click here for full list) invited by the Dart Centre.

“We have had many training seminars over the years in the region, from the BBC and others,” said Jasna Jankovic of Belgrade's B-92 radio, who first attended a dedicated Dart Centre seminar on journalism and trauma in Croatia in April 2003.

“But these have been the best seminars I have ever done. They're useful and practical, and we now need to spread the knowledge.”

Ana Petruseva, director of the Macedonia reporting operation of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, said that meeting so many health professionals from the region had been extremely informative and very encouraging.

“A huge gathering like this makes us aware of the importance of this issue,”” she said. “When we used to talk of trauma we only thought of war. We would forget that this is also about traffic accidents, domestic violence and the everyday things we take for granted. To recognise what people are feeling will make us better journalists.”

At a dedicated journalism-and-trauma workshop as part of the conference, a mix of some 25 Dart-sponsored reporters and trauma professionals were asked to consider scenarios involving a school shooting and a terrorist bomb attack — and how and what the two sides would need to know from each other.

The groups reached a rich variety of conclusions:

• Therapists and psychologists have important messages they need to get to the public about responses to trauma — and the only way is through the media. So, it's essential to find ways of doing that well.

• Journalists are important for developing political attitudes in society — for example as happened in Germany where the reporting of the emotional distress of traumatised refugees led to a wider political recognition of their rights.

• Journalists need to be educated by the experts on how survivors and victims react to trauma — and that not everyone will show the same responses. Some will be expressing grief and distress. Others will be showing nothing at all, and that should not be misunderstood.

• Journalists asked to be helped with understanding who might be appropriately interviewed after a tragedy without their being unnecessarily retraumatised.

• Some of the therapists had had bad experiences of journalists who thought they knew everything about trauma, but manifestly didn't when their reports were read the next day.

• Journalists sometimes found the professionals reluctant to give the information they really needed — and then unable to convey that in language that would be easily understood.

• Therapists who had had good experience of journalists found it useful always to ask in advance what the questions might be, and to prepare some answers.

• And therapists/psychologists were encouraged not to hold back with their knowledge. “You're the experts. Tell us what questions we should be asking.”

The Zagreb seminar and Dart participation in the Zagreb ESTSS symposium followed two earlier Dart-sponsored trauma-and-journalism seminars in Croatia in 2002 and 2003, and one in Montenegro in 2001.

For the first time in South-East Europe, the trauma meeting also included a journalist from the small former Soviet republic of Moldova, with its serious problems of human trafficking, migration and organised crime.

Lilia Cojocaru, who has worked for the BBC and is now press spokesperson for the local office of the International Organisation for Migration, said: “The participants in this workshop helped me better understand what trauma is, where it starts, and how to protect myself and others from its consequences.”

Added trauma therapist from the Irish Republic Mary Lalor, “It was interesting to notice the mirroring between the work of the psychotherapist and the journalist in working with trauma, and to realise that that as therapists we have expertise and experience in working with trauma survivors which might be valuable to journalists in their own work of interviewing.

“But we need to be clear about what it is we have to offer and how to convey that to the media.”

Besides the dedicated workshop on journalism, the two-day ESTSS symposium addressed issues such as the retraumatisation of war veterans in the former Yugoslavia, forms of trauma treatment and the experience of local crisis intervention by psychologists in Croatia.

Echoing the experience of journalists working with trauma, Norbert Gurris of the Catholic University in Berlin reported on the experience of vicarious traumatisation and distress but also of personal fulfilment among mental health teams working with refugees in the German-speaking world.

While one-third of a group of therapists working with refugees and survivors of torture had experienced burnout, said Gurris, only 17% of his study group registered as suffering from compassion fatigue — while an extraordinary 96% spoke of what the researcher Charles Figley in the US first described as “compassion satisfaction.”

The conclusions reflect also some of the informal conclusions reached by journalists at the Dart Centre's recent London workshop on journalism and spirituality, and of research findings how for many reporters the personal distress of their job can be balanced by a sense of value and worth in doing important work.

Journalists attending the Zagreb seminar included:

Ana Petruseva — Macedonia, Director of the Skopje branch of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR);

Drago Pilsel — Croatia, senior Zagreb journalist and commentator;

Jasna Jankovic — Serbia, Radio B92 Belgrade and host of a weekly show “Catharsis” on Serbia's and the region's emotional processing of the experience of war;

Lilia Cojocaru – Moldova, journalist and now press spokesperson for the International Organisation of Migration in Chishinau;

Marjolein Wijnand — The Netherlands, former journalist who covered Northern Iraq in 1993;

Stanka Macesic — Serbia, journalist, Novi Sad, and co-director of the first-ever television documentary in the former Yugoslavia on PTSD among war survivors;

Valentin Areh — Slovenia, correspondent with experience of covering wars in Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans. See his personal story.