Journalist’s PTSD memoir offers important lessons for news industry
“I expected the organization to look after me, not try to force me out”
Dean Yates reports from tsunami disaster zone, Indonesia 2004. Wave destruction path in background. (supplied)
Dean Yates has been to hell and back.
His just-released memoir Line in the Sand is a raw, deeply personal account of life-threatening PTSD injury suffered as a journalist with Reuters, his recovery, his reincarnation, and an exploration of how the news industry deals with mental injury on the job.
I write this as an advocate for health and safety reform within journalism. Yates’s book is a must-read for journalists, editors, news managers and industry HR and legal departments.
Yates recounts how his cumulative trauma covering earthquakes, the Bali Bombings, the 2004 Boxing day tsunami in Indonesia and ultimately having two staffers killed by a U.S. helicopter attack while under his watch as Reuters bureau chief in Iraq led him to a total breakdown.
Crushed, he winds up in a psych ward alongside other frontline professionals - soldiers, police officers, fire fighters.
In my first group session on anger management, I blow up. The lack of empathy from my Reuters editors has broken me, I say. I’m red-faced, arms waving. I got one phone call two days before my admission. That was it. Others say their bosses haven’t called in more than a year. What is it about PTSD that makes it so hard for bosses to pick up the phone? The consensus is we’re seen as damaged goods.
Some coppers use the word ‘contagion’ to describe their experience: it was like they had a contagious disease. Their bosses, even colleagues, wanted nothing to do with them… As a result, they lost their identity, their sense of self. Other patients say that once they put their hand up about their mental illness, they were fast-tracked for discharge (vets)or dismissal (coppers). Will I ever work again, is a question that haunts just about every patient …
—from Line in the Sand, Dean Yates, Pan Macmillan Australia, 2023.
Yates tackles his journey like any good journalist as he embarks on detailed research, wide reading, and tons of personal therapy as he tries to investigate and understand his own psychological wounds.
Woven through a gripping tale of recovery, Line in the Sand offers rich insight into the science of vicarious trauma, PTSD, best practices, and importantly Yates’s experience of “moral injury” he felt at his treatment by Reuters after twenty-three years of service.
“The way I was treated by Reuters was harder to deal with for me than all the trauma I witnessed,” Yates told me in an interview from his home in Tasmania.
I can’t speak for Reuters on what happened with Yates. But I do know they have been leaders in creating peer support and trying to offer specialized counseling to their journalists.
I also know, however, that many journalists psychologically injured on the job report mistreatment or neglect by their news editors and bosses. In some cases, those supervisors rely on instruction from HR and legal advisors who can be at a far remove from the realities of frontline journalists and their newsrooms.
We’ve work to do. Ironically, as an industry built on the use of words and literacy, our own literacy around mental health and how to deal with injured employees is still sadly lacking.
Yates offers an important contribution to help fix that. As a candid insider's perspective, I place Line in the Sand on a list of essential reads for anyone looking to better understand journalists’ and newsroom psychological health that includes:
Line in the Sand: A life-changing journey through a body and mind after trauma by Dean Yates (2023)
The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder by David Morris (2016)
Breaking: Trauma in the Newsroom edited by Chris Lindsay with Leona O’Neill (2022)
