A Mental Health Epidemic In The Newsroom

David Handschuh was snapping photos for the New York Daily News when the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsed on Sept. 11, trapping him beneath twisted metal and a dusting of powdered concrete. His leg was shattered; he was covered in burns.

But Handschuh, who now works as a photo editor at Yahoo, says the scale of the destruction made it, paradoxically, easier to handle. “If it wasn’t so completely unbelievable, it would have been more traumatic,” he says. “I’m not sure I’ve started to process it yet; it’s very easy to suspend reality when what you’re watching is so unreal.”

It is one of the more surprising findings in the literature: Journalists exposed to trauma for prolonged periods of time are able to develop more robust defense mechanisms than those who experience mental and emotional stress intermittently. As Handschuh said, “It’s not just the big scary thing that are going to play with your mind.” The point isn’t that journalists exposed to mass devastation are invincible, but that those suffering most are often tucked away where others don’t think to look.

“Journalists are soldiers,” Handschuh said. “We’re not getting shot at most of time. But we are witnessing things with our notepads that normal, rational human beings are running from. And we’re staying and recording and telling the truth.”

Handschuh recalls encountering a batch of young video editors who were tasked with sorting through raw battlefield footage. Twenty-something and at the start of their career, they’d put in long hours without complaining. Handschuh says that when he told the manager the kids were “wallowing in terror,” the boss countered that the station was “bringing in food when they’re working long hours.”

Let’s face it: Like most of us toiling in the newsroom, those young editors were probably happy just to have jobs. Which is to say it’s not only the stories that journalists cover that weigh on them: The whole profession is a pressure cooker. “Everybody is doing way more with way less,” Handschuh said. “The person who can’t hold up to that test loses their job or is ostracized.”

A recent analysis and ranking of 200 common jobs from job-listing site CareerCast put “newspaper reporter” dead last. Photojournalists (No. 195) and editors (No. 137) didn’t fare much better. Given the precarious economics of industry, there’s little job security, particularly for those working at print publications. Newspaper jobs have declined 40 percent in the last decade. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that jobs for reporters, correspondents and broadcast-news analysts will fall another 13 percent by 2022.

Journalists aren’t popular, either. In a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, journalists ranked just above lawyers in public perceptions of the profession’s contributions to society.

And as any reporter who’s ever been dressed down by an overzealous PR flack or threatened with a lawsuit will tell you, the job entails a good degree of work-related harassment — threats from sources and subjects, hate mail, abuse on social media. All this on top of the standard workplace stressors — deadlines, conflicts with coworkers and managers, malfunctioning equipment. “Being a journalist is more stressful than people realize,” said the University of Tulsa’s Newman.

We cope in different ways. But the image of the chain-smoking, heavy-drinking reporter exists for a reason. “As hard drugs are to the hard-rocker and tattoos are to the NBA player, so booze is to the journalist,” wrote Slate media critic Jack Shafer in 2008. His piece, which was inspired by the no-alcohol rule The Cincinnati Post introduced on its final day of production, is a paean to the reporter with addiction problems: “If he likes sex, he has too much of it. Ditto for food. If he drinks, he considers booze his muse. If he smokes, he smokes to excess, and if he attempts to quit, he uses Nicorette and the patch.”

“There’s almost a celebration of characters,” said Raymond McCaffrey, a veteran journalist of 25 years who is now director of the Center for Ethics at the University of Arkansas. But one needn’t look far to see that this appreciation for characters can serve to glorify behaviors that would raise concern in a more typical workplace. In life as in death, literary critic and journalist Christopher Hitchens’ drinking was treated as evidence of his joie de vivre. But as The Nation’s Katha Pollitt dared to note among the chorus of enablers romanticizing Hitchens’ alcoholism after he passed away from esophageal cancer in 2011, in reality, “his drinking was not something to admire, and it was not a charming foible. … [It] made him angry and combative and bullying, often toward people who were way out of his league — elderly guests on the Nation cruise, interns (especially female interns).”

It was not surprising that most of the writers glamorizing Hitchens’ substance abuse were men. Journalism is a male-dominated profession, and the same frat-house ethos that treats drug and alcohol abuse as cool also discourages us from speaking frankly and openly about trauma we experience on the job.

“You see a lot in the literature about journalism’s macho culture,” McCaffrey said. “People talk about how journalists feel pressure not to turn down dangerous assignments. Women in particular have identified the profession’s macho culture as one that discourages emotional expression.”