Vicarious Trauma
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'What's it like when your job involves wading through others' suffering? I was left weeping and hopeless'
by Dhruti Shah, The Guardian
“Psychologists call it ‘vicarious trauma’ – the result of witnessing too much misery, even if you’re not experiencing it first hand. And it can affect anyone, from war correspondents to legal professionals and interpreters”
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Guide by @HeadlinesNet for individuals and newsrooms on vicarious trauma
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‘I feel like I cannot say no to looking at horrific UGC because I want to do well in my career’
New research shows how vicarious trauma is a serious issue for journalists looking at User-Generated Content. EMHub’s Sam Dubberley explains why newsrooms and their managers have to treat it as such.
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Witnessing images of extreme violence: a psychological study of journalists in the newsroom
by Anthony Feinstein, Blair Audet, Elizabeth Waknine
User Generated Content – photos and videos submitted to newsrooms by the public – has become a prominent source of information for news organisations. Journalists working with uncensored material can frequently witness disturbing images for prolonged periods. How this might affect their psychological health is not known and it is the focus of this study. -
In the Line of Duty: Covering Trauma
Louise Tickle on the sometimes devastating impact of covering disturbing stories.
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Blindsided: Journalists and Vicarious Trauma:
A panel discussion produced by the Forum for the Canadian Association of Journalists national conference in Ottawa on April 29, 2017. Panelists: Dr. Anthony Feinstein, psychiatrist, University of Toronto; Dave Seglins, senior investigative journalist, CBC News; and Mary Ann Baynton, program director, Great-West Life Centre for Mental Health. Moderated by Cliff Lonsdale, Forum president.
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Committee to Protect Journalists: Photojournalists are as vulnerable to psychological trauma as they are to physical and digital threats. 85 percent of the photographers CPJ surveyed said that they worried about trauma.
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Documenting trauma can be traumatic for photojournalists themselves
by @ross_taylor for @nppa
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First Draft News: Journalism and Vicarious Trauma
A Guide for Journalists, Editors and News Organisations
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Dart Center: Handling Traumatic Imagery: Developing a Standard Operating Procedure:
A standard operating procedure (S.O.P.) is a device for building a systematic approach to a task. This guide goes through a series of structured steps for how to craft a personalised workflow for handling graphic content that depicts death, injury, and other violations.
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Open Notebook: When Science Reporting Takes An Emotional Toll
by @WudanYan: "The mental health hazards of covering war, terrorism, violence, and other disasters are well known. But science, environmental, and health journalists can also be at risk. Science journalists might experience what clinical psychologists call “vicarious trauma,” which refers to the emotions that arise when reporters bear witness to another person’s suffering."
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Finally recognizing secondary trauma as a primary issue
by Sam Dubberley, July 2020, Columbia Journalism Review
“Journalists, investigators, and researchers who use social media platforms for their research know how distressing and traumatic the content those platforms host can be. For the past decade, details from the world’s conflicts have been shared on platforms including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, among others. The aftermath of air strikes, illegal killings, torture, decapitations, grieving parents and orphaned children—if you can imagine it, you can probably find it. Many say there are more hours of the Syrian conflict on YouTube than there have been in the conflict itself.”
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Puppies, selfies, corpses: How graphic images on social media can change your brain
by @ShanifaNasser, CBC News