Originally Published to Medium
Imagine getting your hair cut by your local hairdresser. A man walks in and confronts the woman as she has your hair in-between her fingers. He pulls out a gun and starts shooting the woman as you are still sitting in the salon chair. Her blood covers your clothes and you end up having to throw them out. Now you have to go to work and cover this story, since it’s your job. This happened to Joe Reavis.
“The hardest stories in the world to write are stories about yourself,” said Joe Reavis, a reporter for Wylie News.
This is the job of many crime reporters. They are expected to go to the aftermath of mass shootings, natural disasters and even bombings so that they are able bring a story to their editors. However, after a while all the stories do start to affect journalist’s mental health.
Reavis who has been a journalist “for all but three years” since he graduated from college in 1977 says that this story has stuck with him for over 10 years after he reported on it.
10 years after this incident Reavis started getting flashbacks of the incident. That’s when he decided to talk to a psychiatrist and he is now able to recognize when he is about to have a post-traumatic stress disorder episode.
Reavis has been diagnosed with PTSD due to “a culmination from that one violent event and coverage of violent occurrences over the years.”
“I feel strange, I may have to go for a walk or visit my dog to get me to think of something else,” he said.
The main piece of advice he gives reporters who might be going through the same thing is to “seek help,” and not to keep it to yourself.
“One of the beautiful things is you get a front row seat to tragedies and joys,” said Tony Plohetski, an investigative reporter for the Austin American-Statesman. “One of the hard things is you’re there, so you absorb all the emotions.”
Plohetski covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 went to New Orleans to do some reporting. He “literally saw people dying on the streets.”
“After that was over, I did go through a period of depression,” Plohetski said.
Plohetski tells people, “that the media industry is 20 years behind law enforcement”: “In newsrooms there is still the culture of ‘what’s your story today. ’ ”
He now tries to limit his exposure to such tragedies. He said during the Sutherland Springs event, since he was so close in Austin, that he and several reporters would circle in and out staying for around two days then leaving.
However, he said he believed that reporting on such events does help him in his career.
“I think it makes you more relatable to the people you’re covering,” Plohetski said. “You can empathize as you write stories, you can write a more compassionate tone and I think that’s what makes for better work.”
Nicole Cobler, a Washington correspondent for The Dallas Morning News, was still in college when she experienced her first traumatic event as a young journalist.
“The closest I got was the UT stabbing because I was a student at the university, while I was also trying to be a reporter,” Cobler said.
“I was talking to students who witnessed the stabbing and it was really hard the week after walking around campus and pretending it was normal when it wasn’t,” she added.
Eventually, she reached out to Diana Dawson, a journalism lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin. After letting Dawson know she was “having a hard time coping with it and she gave [her] some advice,” they decided to get a group of students who covered the stabbing to talk about how they were feeling.
James Pennebaker, the former head of psychology at UT and an expert on how groups and individuals respond to traumatic events, agreed with this process for dealing with traumatic events.
“The issue is that the system has to encourage people to process what they have just experienced,” Pennebaker said. “It can’t be just distraction.”
He gave an example about psychotherapists having low rates of PTSD and one reason why is because of the training they go through at the beginning of their careers. During “their first few cases they always have a supervisor, and after they talk to a person then they go and talk with their supervisor about it.”
“The supervisor also asks them how they are feeling about it and how they are thinking about it,” Pennebaker said.
One recommendation Pennebaker had for newsrooms, so that journalists are able to process the events they just reported on, is “their supervisors should talk with them afterwards, what did they see, how did they feel.”
“I learned that emotional aftermath after dealing with a big story is a legitimate issue,” Plohetski said. “It is a legitimate issue that reporters are not immune to.”
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