Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War

2 Danger’s Troubled Legacy: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

24 2 Danger’s Troubled Legacy: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder * * * He who would live off war must eventually yield something in return. Bertolt Brecht The dangers war journalists work under were exposed, tragically, early on in my study. With the questionnaires en route to him, Miguel Gil Moreno, one of the most respected cameramen in the profession, was killed while covering the civil war in Sierra Leone. Shock, disbelief, outrage, anguish— I would witness these emotions time and again when war journalists were killed or wounded. That Moreno had intimations of his own mortality was revealed in a haunting segment of video interview. ‘‘The last six years of my life [have been] the most incredible experience a single human being can have,’’ he divulged in a BBC documentary. ‘‘But I cannot see the picture of my family the day they get the phone call saying I have been killed in a war.’’ Moreno’s work as a cameraman had an emotional intensity he was unlikely to experience elsewhere. This explains his relentless desire to return to areas he knew were hazardous. And, though he wanted to avoid these issues, in the few lines of that interview he disclosed that he had thought of his demise. No doubt he did so often, given the frequency with which he would have seen death come to others in his six-year tenure as cameraman to the world’s misery. Feted with a Rory Peck Award for freelance cameraperson of the year, Moreno specialized in the visual image, yet, ironically, the one picture that eluded his imagination was that of his family receiving notification of his death. And that image proved elusive because he could not quite bring himself to believe in it. From this brief insight into his emotional life, we see two competing forces at play. On one hand, the images Moreno had seen of death and dying begged the question, When is it my turn? a thought so distressing it could be contemplated only in the Danger’s Troubled Legacy 25 abstract. On the other hand, he avoided this thought’s logical conclusion, the effect of his death on his shocked and grieving family. Moreno stopped short of being able to see this tragic denouement, the image was effectively suppressed, albeit unconsciously, and as a result he avoided witnessing (and experiencing) the pain and hurt his death would bring to loved ones. I never met Miguel Gil Moreno and must therefore draw back from the temptation of letting an analysis of just two sentences generate an allembracing clinical opinion. I cannot say whether this intrepid cameraman ever suffered psychologically from what he had seen and experienced, but in that brief, prescient comment captured on film, I find evidence of intrusion and avoidance, two of the three central tenets underpinning a syndrome known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). * * * Much has been written about PTSD, a diagnosis that first appeared in 1980 when the American Psychiatric Association revised its classification system for mental illness. It was not, however, a ‘‘new’’ diagnosis, appearing de novo. For much of the twentieth century, psychiatrists had recognized that individuals who were subjected to life-threatening stressors could suffer psychologically . What had been contentious was how this suffering manifested, and there began a vigorous discussion on the type of signs and symptoms that typically arose in traumatized people. The debate continues to this day, albeit less intensely, with the majority of psychiatrists who believe in the validity of PTSD at loggerheads with a skeptical minority who feel the condition has more to do with post-Vietnam psychosocial forces within American society than empirical science. Notwithstanding these rumblings of disquiet, the disorder has been accepted by both the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association as a valid set of symptoms that may follow exposure to a life-threatening stressor. According to diagnostic criteria, to suffer from PTSD an individual must have experienced or witnessed an event that involved actual or threatened death or serious injury. The person’s response to this must involve fear, helplessness, or horror. A specified number of symptoms from each of three categories, intrusion, avoidance, and arousal, must also be present before the diagnosis can be made. These three categories make up the PTSD triad. Re-experienced or intrusive symptoms include recurrent and involuntary distressing images, thoughts, dreams, and flashbacks of the traumatic event. Examples of persistent avoidant symptoms are efforts to ward off [18.116.40.177] Project...