Trauma - an occupational hazard in journalism

TIM HUME

ONE MORNING, nearly eight years ago, Philadelphia-based photojournalist Jim MacMillan woke to the sound of the radio newsreader stumbling through the 9am bulletin. He turned on the television, saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center, and realised he needed to be in New York.

Within two hours he had made it to New Jersey, but lower Manhattan was closed to all comers. He hitchhiked a circuitous route to Midtown, then began humping it on foot down to the financial district, against the tide of panicked New Yorkers. "You can't be here! There's no way through! You have to turn back!" the cops told him, but, amid the pandemonium, he managed to barrel through every roadblock: 65, by his count.

By the time he neared Ground Zero, it was dark. The stars were visible above the blackened skyscrapers. "It was a very cosmic journey," recalls MacMillan. One of the few outposts of humanity, and electricity, was an upmarket Irish bar, its neon sign buzzing in the silence. Inside, a barman poured drinks for a gaggle of stunned traders, their suits caked in dust, their eyes glued to a television set.

At about 11pm, ignoring a final police instruction not to proceed, he turned down an alley. "It was carpeted with rats, I think eating remains," he says. He emerged into the cathedral of wreckage left by the collapsed towers, and stayed there, shooting undisturbed into the dawn.

For a long time, the stunned, overtired photographer didn't register what he was seeing. "Because of the emergency lighting, it looked like a movie shoot," he says. "It couldn't be the World Trade Center it was just a pile of crap."

But as it sank in that he was at the epicentre of an unprecedented terrorist attack, "possibly standing on the remains" of its victims, MacMillan felt a sense of tremendous "responsibility to history": "I have to shoot everything. I have to remember everything."

RUSHING TO the scene of traumatic events and recording the awful events unfolding is a quotidian part of a journalist's job. MacMillan later discovered that this response was largely to blame for the crippling psychological after-effects he endured.

Last Tuesday, before an audience at Auckland University, MacMillan gave an account of his breakdown. It was his first engagement on a tour of the country speaking about journalism and trauma, and the venue had been shifted to a larger hall to accommodate the numbers turning out to hear the nuggety, fast-talking 48-year-old.

Scrolling through a slideshow of his work, MacMillan observed that the portfolio of highlights from his 30-year career including the Oklahoma bombing, Hurricane Katrina, and numerous murders on the streets of Philadelphia was also a vivid gallery of trauma. He warned the squeamish to divert their eyes before showing graphic shots from Iraq. His remarkable photographs from September 11 he was one of only six photographers to have been at Ground Zero during the period after the towers fell and before authorities sealed the site represented another professional triumph, but also, he said, his "psychological Waterloo".

With hindsight, MacMillan realises he had spent most of his career prior to that day with the "pint glass" of his psyche filled pretty close to the brim. September 11 swiped the glass clean off the bar top.

For a year-and-a-half following the attack, MacMillan was virtually disabled. He couldn't sleep more than a couple of hours a night. He became "psychologically homeless", withdrawing from relationships and growing disconnected from people around him, including his partner. (The relationship ended.) He developed a rat phobia which left him spooked by squirrels and chipmunks.

But, working in an industry which he says has "embraced a myth that you can cover trauma and emerge unscathed", he never addressed the problem. In fact, he welcomed the extra hours gained by not sleeping. It wasn't until a clinical psychologist acquaintance remarked as an aside that he must have witnessed plenty of trauma, and offered to help him with counselling, that he realised the unending assault of death and misery he confronted in his work might have had something to do with it. He started therapy, grateful the psychologist was in another city where the stigma of his treatment was unlikely to filter back to his workplace.

MACMILLAN LIKE growing numbers of experienced journalists now perceives an "epidemic" of psychological distress among reporters who deal with traumatic situations. Not just war correspondents, but police reporters, spot news reporters pretty much everybody but the sports, business and arts teams is vulnerable. In cities like Philadelphia, even the education reporters frequently deal with murders.

Journalists are classed by the American Psychiatric Association as "first responders", like police and ambulance staff, and research suggests a significant minority are at risk of developing long-term psychological problems post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and substance abuse. Yet a culture of bravado means that the potentially harmful effects are rarely discussed. "Young newspaper journalists almost immediately have to go out and do death knocks," says MacMillan, and refers to a 25-year-old former colleague of his who had covered hundreds of murders in his few brief years in the trade. "No one has ever asked him if he is OK."

Casualties are not hard to find. South African photographer Kevin Carter committed suicide in 1994, a year after winning the Pulitzer for a famous photograph of a vulture eyeing up an emaciated Sudanese toddler. A photographer for New Orleans' Times-Picayune attempted "suicide by cop" after Katrina. "What I see more often among my friends and colleagues is what I would call a slow-motion suicide," says MacMillan. "Drugs and alcohol, not taking care of themselves."

An increased awareness of the toll of his work did not deter him from putting himself back in the furnace, though. He spent a year in Iraq from 2004-5, embedded and unembedded, experiencing a level of "contact" far beyond what he anticipated. "I survived two car bombs, three roadside bombs, two kidnap attempts. Our hotel was mortared just about every day, and I was shot in the helmet once."

MacMillan won a Pulitzer in 2005 for his role as a senior member of a nine-strong Associated Press photographic team in the war, "but it was hard to celebrate, because all I ever prayed for was to come back with my arms and legs". He shows a photograph of the cake given to his team on their victory. "It was a really horrible cake," he says. "You can't celebrate after all this death. You can't drink champagne."

THE LEGACY of Iraq stayed with him long after he returned. He would scurry across intersections as though snipers were trying to pick him off. He imagined he could see insurgents in the crowd.

But he continued addressing the symptoms through therapy, and discovered the encouraging possibility of post-traumatic growth the phenomenon of bouncing back stronger and smarter from a damaging experience. His career trajectory reflected this: his interest in the field eventually led to a fellowship with the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, the organisation that has sponsored his speaking tour, and he now teaches the only undergraduate trauma journalism course in the United States.

The Dart Center's focus on trauma journalism is twofold. As well as advocating greater awareness among media organisations of trauma's impact on staff, the centre promotes reform in the way the news industry makes commodities of victims and survivors. MacMillan has done much soul-searching on the latter in recent years, becoming something of an angry penitent.

By his reckoning, his most egregious sin was a picture he took on Christmas Eve 24 years ago. It is of a woman, wearing a Santa hat and a numb expression, who has just been pulled aside by a police officer and told that all her children have perished in a fire.

MacMillan recalls taking the photo: the confusion of whether he should be intruding on a private moment of grief, the reflexive decision to shoot after a rival photographer fired off a frame, the praise of his workmates for nailing the "Christmas tragedy" shot. He remembers punching his car dashboard in disgust on the drive home.

Today, he says: "I feel regret because I might have made the most unimaginably horrible moment of somebody's life a little bit worse. I feel angry that I was put in that situation without the proper training and the necessary information to make that decision."

Although it felt wrong at the time, the decision to shoot was a reflection of the pressure he was under as a young journalist in an unforgiving industry. He was trying to satisfy demanding editors who had no real interest in the ethical dilemmas he encountered on the job. "Twenty-four years on, those guys are retired, they're all out of the game. I don't care about them. But I'm left with this moment, with what I did."

It's just as difficult for young journalists now to resist those institutional pressures, but MacMillan hopes that raising the issues, questioning old newsroom logic and practices, will lead to some change. "The goal is restraint and sensitivity, and the strategy is disruption," he says. "I don't have solutions I just want us to talk about it. We talk about schedules, budgets. Let's talk about trauma."

Besides, he says, trauma costs. "It costs productivity, it costs excellence, it costs in sick leave."

There was a post 9/11 groundswell to his cause, with the Dart Center attracting support from many of American journalism's elite. "But that's really fallen off the table with all the other cutbacks," he says. "The mantra is you've got to do more with less. I don't think newsrooms are going to be terribly sensitive to trauma issues right now when they're trying to figure out if they can keep their city hall reporter another week."

Last year MacMillan quit his job at the newspaper he had worked at for 17 years after he was taken off his photo columnist beat and asked to provide his own car. He's working on developing a new media project. It's not surprising that someone who preaches the possibility of post-traumatic growth believes that journalism will survive its current woes, albeit reformed and no doubt improved in some way. But as it stands, in its current state, he can only offer what amounts to a qualified endorsement.

"I started out wanting to live an unconventional life," he says. "There are times when I envy people who took a more conventional path. Is it good for relationships? I don't know. Is it good for your mental health? It's not easy."

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