If you've noticed a lull in the action lately on the Dart Center website, rest assured it is not a reflection of what's going on behind the scenes. Among numerous other activities, we've been hard at work on new features for a fully redesigned website. In a few weeks, this space will be more active, useful and user-friendly than ever. Stay tuned.
Today is the second day of a conference the Dart Center is hosting (along with the Open Society Institute and The Fund for Independence in Journalism) at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. You can watch the panels online at BlogTalkRadio, and read background materials, information about the panelists and almost-live blogging coverage at the official conference website.
Turn on C-SPAN2 tonight at 7 p.m. (EST) and watch 2005 Ochberg Fellow Mike Walter's documentary "Breaking News, Breaking Down."
This year's Al Nakkula Award for Police Reporting went to Karyn Spencer, a 2008 Ochberg Fellow, for her work on a two-week series in the Omaha World-Herald, exposing Nebraska's bungled coroner system. Rocky Mountain News has the announcement here.
On today's edition of BBC's Media Show, host Ed Stourton, ABC reporter Richelle Hunt, Global Editor for Multimedia at Reuters Chris Cramer and International Editor of Channel 4 News Lindsey Hilsum discuss how journalists can best be supported when covering traumatic events. Their varied experiences--Hunt's recent coverage of the Australian bushfires, Hilsum's coverage of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and Chris Cramer's years as an editor and experience as a hostage during the 1980 Iranian embassy siege--make for an interesting exchange.
Already the human toll is the greatest in the state's history and it is also now the nation's largest bushfire tragedy, with Victorian police commissioner Christine Nixon warning that authorities expect to find the bodies of more victims as it becomes safe to move into many devastated communities after any fire threat has abated.
Early reports are that more than 700 homes have been destroyed across the state, many of them in towns in the Kinglake area. Many of those who died were trapped in their vehicles while trying to escape furious fire fronts.
Australian news outlets have scrambled reporting teams to cover the devastation, which has included the almost complete annihilation of several townships in the central Victorian highlands, including Kinglake, Marysville and Narbethong.
I just spoke to a photographer who yesterday flew across much of the bushfire zone in a helicopter[...]He said there are bodies beside roads and houses and in the burnt-out shells of cars. ''It's just carnage," he said.
I think it's important to give our colleagues in the US and elsewhere a sense of the immensity of this tragedy. The forecast now is that the toll will top 200, there are 5000 'refugees'. It is Dante-esque in its scale and horror.
Australia is facing its greatest natural disaster ever and—as is so often the case—at the centre of this massive story is an enormous number of media professionals, many of whom have been devastated by their own losses.
Brian Naylor, one of the country's most respected news anchors and his wife Moiree died in their blazing home north of Melbourne where he spent his retirement. A fire front raced through their small town, killing nine people. After 40 years in the industry, his death will have a huge impact on his former newsrooms.
Another television reporter, Norm Beaman, rang through to his network on air to reveal his wife had called, saying the house was about to burn and she was going to hide in their truck. That was his last contact. The raw emotion in his voice, as he wondered if he'd lost his family was extraordinary. This morning - a good news story. They've been been reunited.
The death toll is well over 100. Given the enormity of the area involved, it's not surprising to learn some of the media are the first to stumble upon the burnt corpses of victims. The firestorm was fanned so quickly, it was young weekend staff for many organisations who were the first to be sent out.
Radio stations took calls around the clock from residents warning others to leave town, or simply to share their own experiences. Radio networks became the link between fire fighters and the people they were trying to save.
There has also been an enormous amount of material posted online from readers and viewers. It's been saturation coverage, only made possible by hundreds of dedicated journalists, camera crews and photographers who are continuing to face enormous pressures themselves.
The fires are still burning. Many areas remain inaccessible. The stories are still being told.
Hughes and his wife and a 13 year-old girl they care for fled to their car as the house burnt around them. Finding his keys were not in the vehicle, he had to re-enter the blazing, smoke-filled house and fumble in a bag for spare keys. ''The smoke is so thick I can't see far enough to look into the bag," he wrote in today's edition of the paper. "I find them by touch, thanks to a plastic spider key chain our daughter gave (her mother) as a joke. Our lives are saved by a plastic spider."
Hughes managed to start the car and get down his property's driveway to where the flames have passed. They sat there, motor running, air conditioner going, and watched as their home, their pets, most of their possessions, and most of their neighbour's houses were destroyed. Hughes and his wife suffered superficial burns.
But he wrote: ''...Then I realise, of course, it doesn't matter. We escaped with our lives. Just. So many others didn't."
If you haven't heard of GlobalPost--an ambitious new international news start-up-- read this Columbia Journalism Review profile now. Whether or not their innovative business and editorial model is the Future of Journalism, it's cheering to read on their founding editor Charles M. Sennott's blog that they will be distributing the Dart Center's guide to covering violence--Tragedies and Journalists--to all their correspondents.
Two weeks ago, we blogged about what newspapers were calling a "controlled landing" and TV networks were calling a "plane crash" in the Hudson River. Today, Maria Alvarez, a 2002 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow who covered the 9/11 attacks and aftermath for the New York Post, writes about her experience reporting on Flight 1549, and how it brought back memories of a very different day when a plane appeared in New York City's skies.
We just got word of an upcoming Northern Short Course in Photojournalism from the National Press Photographers Association, including a program geared specifically at photojournalism educators: "From Newsroom to Classroom."
"the ethical treatment of victims and survivors of traumatic events, the impact of trauma coverage on news consumers and communities, challenges to complete and accurate reporting under stress, and the psychological hazards of traumatic events for the news professionals who cover them."The program is March 19-21 in McLean, VA, and you can find more details here.
A journalist in Sri Lanka writes that if Westerners saw a newspaper editor's murder as a symbol of press freedom, Sri Lankans saw him as "no less than a fallen warrior."
A Sri Lankan newspaper editor's murder was followed by a powerful posthumous editorial in which he defended his criticism of the government even as he predicted it would lead to his death: "There is a calling that is yet above high office, fame, lucre and security. It is the call of conscience."
“Birth trauma is in the eye of the beholder,” [says Cheryl Tatano Beck, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Nursing at the University of Connecticut.] “A majority of the time, if clinicians looked at a woman’s labor and delivery charts they would never dream that the labor and delivery would be so traumatic that the woman would develop post-traumatic stress disorder from that birth.”
Yet, Beck says, “If a woman perceived her labor and delivery as that traumatic, even though it didn’t reflect it in the charts, it’s the mother’s perception that is most important.”
Welcome to 2009. The Dart Center is back online for a busy couple of months; We'll keep you updated on our activities here. In the meantime, here are some items you may have missed over the holiday season.
Now online are several powerful stories PBS has been airing on the Democratic Republic of Congo, putting a human face on statistics impossible to fathom: a decade of civil war that has killed some five million people, left two hundred thousand women raped, and displaced a quarter of a million Congolese in the last three months alone.
On the way to headquarters, I had hidden the “money” tape — with footage of the United Nations jungle patrols — deep in my bag’s “secret pocket,” and I had just reviewed it.
“Fend for yourself,” the Congolese creed, had come in handy. We were lucky. Since that time, reporting has become even more difficult and dangerous.
In next month's Men's Journal, Greg Veis profiles Chris Ware: CNN correspondent, six years into Iraq. Ware shows Veis harrowing video of a raid, and argues for the importance of getting footage that puts viewers close to the awful action of combat.
"When your brothers and sons and mates from the football team come home, and they ain’t quite the same, you have an obligation to sit for three and a half minutes and share something of what it’s like to be there.”But his story also reveals how getting those stories has taken its toll.
“I’m a war dog,” he says. “After seven straight years, you’re always hypervigilant, always on alert. You become conditioned to a state of being where everything is a threat and it’s hard to turn that off; that becomes your normal. There’s an old cliché about the legendary war correspondent who comes home to find he has no wife or many ex-wives, no kids or kids who won’t talk to him, who has no tapestry to his life. At some point you have to consciously reclaim your life.”You can read the whole profile online.
"I can no longer go down that lonely farm road. I still see the bloodied, headless body of the motor cyclist jump out at me from behind the tree that killed him. I was first on the scene before the ambulance or police. I didn't know what else to do other than take in the details for my local paper. I continued to have nightmares for a long, long time about this."So says a small town journalist quoted in an article by Cait McMahon, director of Dart Centre Australasia. In the piece, published on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's "Unleashed," McMahon discusses the unique plight of journalists among first responders, bearing witness to trauma but professionally unable to aid victims directly. She illustrates the effects of this work with clinical findings, including her own, that suggest 15% or even 25% of journalists suffer from probable Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and a higher proportion may suffer from depression and anxiety.
"The aim was that people would understand how children understand these things ... The impact on the group was terrific ... The impact on the individual ... was not so good."Saul lauded DeCesare's approach:
"The principles she's employing are the principles we try to teach therapists: to create a sense of safety for people … to realize that people who are severely traumatized don't often know how to protect themselves."He emphasized the importance, when interviewing victims of those radically disempowered by trauma, of not only giving interviewees choice at every step of the way (the choice to cancel the interview; the choice to take a break), but also of giving them a meaningful context in which to tell their story. This, Saul said, "is one of the most important routes of recovery." The further step in DeCesare's work, in which the "subject" of journalism is made a protagonist and an agent in the creative process, Saul related to art therapy.
"I think that’s an extra step from just telling one’s story … It’s moving to making decisions creatively about how one want to represent one’s story … That extra step is something that’s extremely important in the process of healing."Of course, this doesn't mean that DeCesare's method is the one all journalists will take, or that her method is without its contradictions. Pressed by a questioner on whether there was ever a conflict between her role as a journalist, and her responsibility to the public, and her responsibility to the individual, she responded:
"I’m clear that [to be a therapist and advocate] is not my main goal … but I feel that as a human being I always want to bring that in."To hear the entire rich and complex discussion, check back on the Dart Center homepage, where we will be posting audio from the panel. Donna DeCesare's exhibit "Sharing Secrets: Children's Portraits Exposing Stigma," from which the image of Nancy, above, is drawn, can be viewed online as well as in person at the Columbia University School of Social Work.
"The notion that we should forget is about as disgusting as anything I’ve ever heard in my life ... I would have to, maybe subconsciously, dishonor the people who I left behind there ... and the day I dishonor the friends I left behind ... is the day I put a bullet in my head."
"I think journalists need to start telling those details, because I don’t think that people know what war looks like ... I think the general population has some vague ideas about PTSD and where it comes from and that it fits in to some kind of cowardice ... instead of the obviousness of that: of coming home and not being okay."
Once a year, you can find the world's trauma experts, the Dart Center's staff and the journalists who won Dart's annual Ochberg Fellowships in one place: the annual meeting of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies. This year the place is Chicago, and while the fellows are bonding in their fourth day of seminars, I'm wandering in and out of panels learning about the cutting edge of trauma research from psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, nurses, counselors, administrators, advocates, journalists, and even clergy. Today through Sunday, I'll be blogging their nuggets of wisdom here.
In clinical news, a study published in Archives of General Psychiatry found Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in 70% of those with implanted cardioverter-defibrillators, while a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry found adolescents with psychotic symptoms were more likely to be bullies as well as victims of bullying and to have been exposed to domestic violence. Iraqis in Iraq were reported to be at a much lower risk for PTSD than Iraqis who emigrate. A new VA report found 15% of veterans have experienced sexual trauma. A study of mice suggested that a shot of cortisol after a stressful event could prevent traumatization. The Asbury Park Press dispelled PTSD myths, while the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported how similar symptoms make PTSD and Traumatic Brain Injury difficult to disentangle.
"This isn't a story about the dead. Or about the world's politicians who stood by and did nothing. This is the story of the most vulnerable of the genocide. Women who were the victims of the most brutal acts of a dark war."These words, over an image of shelves of skulls, introduce a new MediaStorm multimedia piece on women sexually violated by Hutu militias during the Rwandan genocide. More than 30 women shared their stories and images with photographer and interviewer Jonathan Torgovnik. They speak of not just the brutal violence itself, but also the aftermath—of raising children born from rape, while being rejected by their families.
33 years ago today, five journalists working for Australian TV networks were killed by Indonesian forces in East Timor, their bodies incinerated and interred at a cemetery in Jakarta. Details about the deaths of Gary Cunningham, Brian Peters, Malcolm Rennie, Greg Shackleton and Tony Stewart were shrouded in mystery, but the fact of their deaths has made them a potent symbol of the threats journalists face worldwide. Dart Centre Australasia joins the Prime Minister of Australia and a 2007 coroner's inquest in calling for all parties to respect the wishes of the families of the "Balibo Five" who call for repatriating their relatives' remains.
"Thirty three years is a long time for the families of these journalists to wait to have their wishes respected. Dart Centre Australasia calls on the Rudd Government to act on the recommendations of the inquiry," said Cait McMahon, Managing Director of the regional Centre. "Whilst the deaths of these men will always be painful for their loved ones, having their wishes respected in regard to the repatriation of their bodies will contribute somewhat to the healing process, even this many years on."
"Ten Years Later, Shepard Case Haunts Reporters." That was the headline of an NPR story this weekend, commemorating the 10th anniversary of gay college student Matthew Shepard's brutal murder with stories from local journalists who reported it. Their words make plain the importance of resources and support for journalists thrust into reporting a communal tragedy.
"I wanted to stand up with these people, with my neighbors and my community ... I wanted to hold a candle, too, and say this violence is not who I am. But that wasn't part of the job, and there was no time to figure all of that out."
"It's just something that pervades your whole sense of what's right and what's wrong ... There was part of me that had to think, 'Am I doing this story justice?'"
"Photojournalists in the mould of [Robert] Capa or Philip Jones Griffiths can no longer compete with instantaneous TV...photojournalists must find a new language."
XDRTB.Org
18 months ago, the legendary photojournalist James Nachtwey received the TED Prize: $100,000 to grant one wish to change the world.
...It has occurred to me that if everyone could be there just once to see for themselves what white phosphorous does to the face of a child or what unspeakable pain is caused by the impact of a single bullet or how a jagged piece of shrapnel can rip someone's leg off - if everyone could be there to see for themselves the fear and the grief, just one time, then they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person, let alone thousands.
But everyone cannot be there, and that is why photographers go there - to show them, to reach out and grab them and make them stop what they are doing and pay attention to what is going on - to create pictures powerful enough to overcome the diluting effects of the mass media and shake people out of their indifference - to protest and by the strength of that protest to make others protest.
The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I am benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It is something I have to reckon with every day because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition I will have sold my soul. The stakes are simply too high for me to believe otherwise.
I attempt to become as totally responsible to the subject as I possibly can. The act of being an outsider aiming a camera can be a violation of humanity. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other, and to that extent I can accept myself.
Last night, Taxi to the Dark Side premiered on HBO. The Oscars' "Best Documentary" reveals in disturbing detail how the US government condoned torture in the wake of 9/11, first in Guantanamo and then in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the sweeping policy narrative is anchored in the smaller story of the driver of the titular taxi: Dilawar, a young Afhgani man who had never spent a day apart from his father and mother until he was arrested and delivered to the US military. Five days later he was dead.
"There are a lot of people that are going to run into this system unless it get fixed. You only need one to remind yourself of what it's capable of."
Journalists in Switzerland and Germany are talking about the case of Carl Just: a war reporter suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder who just sued his former employer. Just's lawsuit appears to be the first suit for work-related PTSD to be brought by a journalist against a European media company.
Cocodrie, La. After Hurricane Gustav
Welcome to DartBlog — a new place to look for informed analysis of media coverage of violence, conflict and tragedy; breakthroughs in trauma science and policy; and how it all bears on the individual reporter. This space will take the place of "Need to Know" and "Story of the Week," with all their past posts accessible in its archive.
According to a study in the September 2008 American Journal of Preventive Medicine, there are only a few proven, effective practices for treating children with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Yet more than 75% of mental health professionals may be practicing something else.
"There is substantial research showing the effectiveness of group or individual cognitive behavioral therapy in treating children and teens experiencing the psychological effects of trauma," the CDC's Robert Hahn, who led the study, said in a statement. "We hope these findings will encourage clinicians to use the therapies that are shown to be effective."
According to a meta-analysis of 19 studies, trauma and PTSD symptoms may precede a reduction in the size of the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. The findings seem to support a physical, neurological component to PTSD.
"The big question about which came first, much like the chicken and the egg, has persisted... We found children’s hippocampi were intact after the onset of abuse, but somehow there was shrinkage in the group that had reached adulthood."
Labels: hippocampus, neuroscience, PTSD
In 2002, Mylo Harvey, an upstanding, 19-year-old leader in the Tulalip Indian Reservation, took hallucinogenic mushrooms, wandered down Casino Road and ended up dead after struggling with the police. This is how a groundbreaking, 11-chapter series by 2003 Ochberg Fellow Scott North begins, but, as its title suggests, "A Truth Beyond" does much more. It is, as North says in the accompanying video, “a story about a story,” and the first-person narrative interweaves Mylo’s case with North's own experience of reporting cops and violence in his more than twenty years at The Herald in Everett, Washington. The story does for the reader what it did for North: “It made me think hard about the role of a newspaper reporter in these times of change and the things that bond and divide those of us who now live in Snohomish County.”
On the morning of July 7th, 2005, explosions in three trains and one bus in London wounded hundreds and killed 52, including the terrorists responsible. In Seven Stories 7/7: Three Years On, Emily Dugan at the Independent lets seven survivors share stories and reflections on both the tragic day and the three intervening years. The diverse first-person accounts — which include witnesses, injured, and even a grieving uncle of one of the bombers — are tied together by pathos and loss, but also by steps forward; into stages of grief, counseling and artistic expression, in a fine example of reporting on a tragic anniversary.
As a risk factor for heart disease, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is like “smoking two to three packs of cigarettes per day for more than 20 years,” according to a Geisinger study published in the July issue of Psychosomatic Medicine. The study examined over 4,000 Vietnam veterans and found that those with PTSD were more than twice as likely to die of heart disease and those without.
Labels: Geisinger, heart disease, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychosomatic Medicine, PTSD
The latest Narrative Digest from the Nieman Foundation of Journalism at Harvard University highlights one of the most remarkable narratives of any month. “Beyond Rape: A Survivor’s Journey” was published in a 16-page special section of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in May. In its 20,000 word first-person narrative, Joanna Connors does what her headline claims: going far beyond her experience in a darkened theater, 23 years ago, to confront the uncomfortable, human complexity of not only her own journey, but her rapist’s.
“That I was a victim was random, of course, a matter of bad luck and bad timing. That he was a criminal and a rapist was not random; he was the product of a cycle of violence. The piece turned into a story of what parents pass on to our children, and about the immense privilege of birth that we on this side of the boundary take for granted.”
“[This story] is about rape. It is about race and class. And it is about our community -- our line-in-the-sand combativeness over these issues, and our stubborn and fearful reluctance to talk about them.
I needed to tell my story, and I think our community needs to see, and talk about, the huge barriers between the haves and the have-nots.”
How can a photographer convey suffering and injustice, yet avoid subjecting those photographed to further harm or stigma? Donna DeCesare answers this question in a photo essay, "Documenting Violence," in the latest issue of ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America, now available online. DeCesare, a member of the Dart Center's executive committee, describes her novel approach in the introduction to her images:
"Knowing that I couldn’t control local exposure of my images, I needed to find a way of working that would protect my subject’s identities, allay their fears, and empower them to speak truthfully about their lives. Those who feel imprisoned by stigma need to have a context in which they can exercise control. When a child asked if he could pick a different name to accompany his photographs and story, it occurred to me that he was really asking to share control. This inspired me to look for ways to make the image-making process collaborative."
More than a week after the earthquake in southwestern China, the death toll has climbed to over 40,000. The most moving and comprehensive English-language overview of how the first week was covered within China, on TV and on the Internet, comes from Deborah Fallows of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. In Part 1 , she witnesses the opening up of Chinese media; what the Associated Press called "unusually aggressive" coverage from state media and a "less censored, an almost free flow of discussion," according to Xiao Qiang, director of the China Internet Project. In Part 2, Fallows describes TV regressing to "functioning in lockstep," with carefully choreographed ceremonies. Outside the media, she finds a different kind of unity:
At 2:28 pm, I went outside our apartment building, alongside a big street and one of the major intersections of Beijing. Hundreds and hundreds of people left their offices, restaurants, and apartments to stand together to show respect with three minutes of silence. Cars stopped, and people got out to stand beside them or to look out over the bridges they were crossing. Jackhammers cased pounding; cranes stopped moving. People were checking mobile phones for the time. Then, on cue, horns from every single car began to sound. It was not honking, but one long, continuous wail. This apparently happened all across China. Then after three minutes, cars started up again, and jackhammers and bus horns, too. Young women wiped their eyes with the backs of their hands. I thought that for a few moments, the country had achieved its goal to be a "harmonious society," just as the Party has been trying to build—but at what a terrible cost.
In a column for the Online Quill, 2005 Ochberg Fellow Melissa Manware recalls some of the hundreds of violent deaths and rapes from her decade covering cops for the Charlotte Observer. Crime stories like these are hard, but her career has shown they are also where a reporter can have her greatest impact; if she can remain both hopeful and emotionally touched. As she recounts:
A few years ago, I wrote about Kristen Smith, a teenager who told her family that she had been molested by a relative when she was 9. Days later, I got a call from a woman in her 40s. She wanted me to know that reading Kristen’s story gave her the courage to finally talk about what happened to her. She was molested as a child and until that day had never told anyone.
That’s what made the work worth the heartache. And that’s what a reporter, especially a crime reporter, has to remember to stay positive when so many of the stories are negative.
"Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Military: A Selected Bibliography" has just been uploaded to the US Army War College website. The bibliography is an update of a 2005 bibliography compiled by the same librarian, Lori Sekala. It includes government sources, along with scholarly journals and periodicals. From the preface:
Over the past several years, the topic of military mental healthcare has received renewed attention, both inside and outside the Armed Forces. This selected bibliography focuses on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its presentation in military personnel. Included are references to books, documents, periodical articles, multimedia, and web sites related to this topic. A separate section concentrates on PTSD in members of the military and its relationship to age, gender, or ethnicity. This is followed by a section focusing on disability claims as the result of PTSD.
Last week, Alysa Landry at the Daily Times in Farmington, New Mexico penned a moving three-part series on veterans suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Part one, Combat that Never Ends, tells the stories of Vietnam veterans who have wrestled with PTSD for decades, but only recently been diagnosed or treated. In part two, The Front Lines Shift... Military Veterans Face Varying Battles, veterans from Iraq repeat the pattern. In fact, Robert Udero of the Farmington Veteran Center says the proportion of veterans suffering from PTSD may be nearly three times higher for Iraq than for Vietnam. Part three, The Search for Combat Trauma Solutions, turns from veterans' suffering to their treatment and recovery. It ends by returning to John Collard, who we met in part one with a gun in his mouth, fighting back two-decade-old memories of the year he spent "covered in blood" as a medic in Vietnam. He was diagnosed with PTSD and began treatment five years ago.
"At 60 years old, I'm about to get my life together," he said. "It's been since 1969 that I've been dealing with this, and to this day, I look back and it's still hard to make sense of it. But I'm 60 years old and I have a future."
In the American Journal of Psychiatry, Jonathan I. Bisson reviews the new Handbook on PTSD: Science and Practice, edited by Matthew J. Friedman, Terence M. Keane and Patricia A. Resickis. The review calls it a “comprehensive” and “highly readable volume that will undoubtedly be of great use to individuals specializing in traumatic stress.”
In the Hartford Courant, Matthew Kauffman and Lisa Chedekel report that, despite the Pentagon’s promises to the contrary, the military continues to refer a far smaller proportion of troops to mental-health professionals than actually have mental-health problems. Less than 1 percent of deploying troops are currently referred, even though several military studies show that nearly 10 percent have mental-health problems.
As the one year anniversary of the Virgina Tech massacre approaches, Donna Alvis-Banks of the Roanoke Times seeks guidance from the survivors of the Columbine school shooting. Alvis-Banks, a 2007 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow reports that, "the key to moving on, the survivors of Columbine say, is a mix of individual trial and error and recognizing that the community as a whole needs mental health outreach." Their advice and moving stories bring a hopeful message of recovery to communities recovering from shocking communal trauma, from Blacksburg, Virginia to Dekalb, Illinois.
Kelly Kennedy at the Air Force Times reports that the Veteran Affairs Department will no longer require veterans already diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder filing a disability claim
In Iraq, troops joke about keeping a pen and paper on hand in case they witness a shooting or explosion or are injured themselves. That way, they can run around and have all their buddies sign a quick statement saying it really happened. The joke loses steam when a Marine has to prove he was involved in a traumatizing event when he had a hand blown off in that event, or when a soldier has to prove he watched his friends die to qualify for benefits.
“They don’t have to reprove their diabetes,” said Mary Ellen McCarthy, special projects counsel for the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee. “They don’t have to reprove a leg injury. I have never seen any other condition diagnosed in service [for which] people had to reprove their injury."
Judy Holland of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer carefully documents sexual assault within the military. Statistics and victims’ stories provide context for proposed legislation that would require an investigation into the handling of these cases and provide support for female veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Researchers have isolated a gene whose variation may help explain why some victims of childhood abuse avoid adult depression. “Knowing what those variations are eventually could help clinicians individualize care for their patients by predicting who may be at risk or suggesting more precise avenues for treatment,” says National Institute of Mental Health Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. The study was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry and funded by the NIMH.
The Torontoist reports that a new study from the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry has found a 10% rate of probable PTSD and a 29% rate of probable depression among Canadian peacekeepers. "Peacekeeping has become more dangerous since evolving from observer operations to peace-enforcing missions in the 1990s," the Torontoist reports.
Linda Tyssen of the Mesabi Daily News reports on the naming of AMVETS Post 33 after Noah Charles Pierce: a 23-year-old Army veteran of the war in Iraq who committed suicide in July, following a battle with post-traumatic stress disorder. Honoring Pierce's service, and treating his death as a casualty of war marks a paradigm shift from previous eras, when mental trauma was ignored, denied, and treated as an aberration. As the article quotes Commander Shawn Carr, who had sought to name the post for Pierce when it was first chartered, "As far as I’m concerned, Noah died of injuries received in combat."
Six journalism grad students working with ABC’s 20/20 spent the summer investigating the stories of soldiers who abuse drugs. In their TV report, soldiers speak to the students of going into war drug-free, but turning to cocaine, amphetamines, and prescription drugs to deal with their traumatic experiences. The military, on the other hand, seems unwilling to admit it has a problem.
“Our students uncovered that for those soldiers who did put their lives on the line and were affected by the trauma of war and did turn to drugs, it is a difficult lonely battle, and one the military would rather pretend is not happening.”
A CBS News investigation finds that the suicide rate for US military veterans is "more than double the suicide rate for those who haven't served."
One in four homeless people in the United States are veterans. Nearly half of those homeless veterans have a diagnosable mental illness. One Iraq War veteran tells Associated Press reporter Kimberly Hefling: "The only training I have is infantry training and there's not really a need for that in the civilian world."
The results from the Department of Veterans Affairs' latest study of suicide among veterans were released this week.
... the study finds that the predictors of suicide among veterans in depression treatment differ from those seen in the general American population, with younger, white, non-Hispanic men having the highest risk among the veterans.
Veterans with substance abuse issues, and those who had been hospitalized for psychiatric reasons in the year before their depression diagnosis, also had a higher suicide risk. Surprisingly, older veterans who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder in addition to depression had a lower overall rate of suicide than those without a PTSD diagnosis, perhaps because they were more likely to receive care through Veterans Affairs PTSD programs.
Click here for a New York Times report on the study.
In the New York Times, Ellen Berry reports on a woman in Staten Island who is collecting narratives from survivors of Liberia’s civil wars for that country's reconciliation commission ...
The Institute of Medicine has completed its review of treatments for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and has found that the "effectiveness of most PTSD treatments is uncertain." The report suggests that more rigorous research is needed to determine which treatments should be used. Click here for the National Academies press release. Click here for a Washington Post story about the report.
Nima Elbagir of Independent Television News reports from Somalia, where African Union troops have been trying to keep peace after last year's invasion by Ethiopian troops ...
Jeffrey Gettleman of The New York Times writes a disturbing report on the rape epidemic in Congo. Gettleman writes:
Eastern Congo is going through another one of its convulsions of violence, and this time it seems that women are being systematically attacked on a scale never before seen here. According to the United Nations, 27,000 sexual assaults were reported in 2006 in South Kivu Province alone, and that may be just a fraction of the total number across the country.
In a five-part series, NPR's Michelle Norris looks at the expanding role of women in the U.S. military. Part five follows women who have suffered serious combat injuries. Part four tells about the increasing number of reported sexual assault in the military. (In a related story, Gloria Hillard profiles a veteran named Sandra, who is "among a growing number of young women who have returned from Iraq with both combat trauma and sexual assault.")
At Vanity Fair, David Margolick profiles two protagonists captured in a photo taken 50 years ago by Arkansas Democrat photographer Will Counts, during the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School ...
Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter Claudia Rowe profiles a local family a year after the death of a son who was accidently shot and killed by his stepbrother. Rowe writes: "Once a sprawling crew of a dozen children, teenagers and assorted adult relations who happily packed themselves into a used van for boisterous road trips, the family has disintegrated" ...
Why do some people exposed to trauma suffer serious psychological consequences such as PTSD while others don't? Hartford Courant reporter Lisa Chedekel profiles Dr. Steven Southwick, a psychiatry professor at Yale who has been studying the factors that lead to psychological resiliency ...
McClatchy's Leila Fadel reports from Tal al Azizziyah, Iraq, a week after four bombs killed at least 354 people there. Fadel writes:
The pungent smell of the dead hangs low in this village, and not even the colorful headdresses the men have wrapped across their faces can keep it out.
“Come here,” a man shouts from atop a pile of rubble, summoning help from other men who are digging through the debris. His shovel has hit something. The digging quickens and dust fills the air. Then a lifeless arm appears, and soon the top half of a woman has been uncovered. The remains are placed in a pink floral comforter and carried off.
Nearly one week after four bombs blew apart this village and a neighboring one, Sheikh Khadar, the dead are still being recovered, adding to the toll that already had made last Tuesday’s bombings the deadliest terrorist attack since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.
From Dart Ochberg Fellow David Handschuh, chair of New York Press Photographer Association's Inter-Governmental Relations Committee:
New York State passed a law that extends till 8/14/08 the time for "Rescue and Recovery Workers" to file for Workers Comp for injuries sustained while working at the World Trade Center. This is a VERY good thing that will help many people but unfortunately excludes Journalists, reporters, photographers, producers, correspondents and others in the media who covered the attack for months afterwards ... I need your assistance in getting a handle on how many media members have health concerns over their 9/11 exposure.
Minneapolis Star Tribune staff responded to the I-35 bridge collapse with thorough breaking news coverage, including stories from survivors and narratives of community action.
Hundreds of faithful kneeled, bowed their heads and clenched their fists this afternoon at churches in Minneapolis and St. Paul, praying for the people lost, injured, grieving or helping out after a bridge crashed into the Mississippi River.
Nobody smiled. They were for the most part a silent, showing reverence for the devastation they saw before them. Showing respect for the crumpled cars they could see, for the dying and injured they couldn't. And reverence for each other in the way that people reach out in times of need.
The focus at the moment is on the lives lost and injured and the heroic efforts of rescuers and first-responders - good Samaritans and uniformed public servants. Minnesotans can be proud of themselves, and of their emergency workers who answered the call.
For full coverage, including how to help, see StarTribune.com.
The current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association targets issues concerning violence and human rights, including depression intervention for young war survivors, abuse of children during parents' military service, and trauma symptoms among child soldiers.
Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje of the San Antonio Express-News explores the risk of abuse and homicide for pregnant women. She writes:
Experts say from 4 percent to 8 percent of pregnant women are physically hurt by their partners — that's 160,000 to 320,000 women a year. For some, the beatings are fatal.
A presidential panel headed by Sen. Bob Dole and former Health and Human Services Director Donna Shalala has recommended vital improvements to the health care system for veterans - including stronger support for those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. For coverage and links to the full report, see NPR.
Sara Cardine of The (Stockton, Calif.) Record reports on a PTSD treatment group for female veterans.
Cardine writes:
... The program helps women deal with multiple sources of trauma. It's not uncommon for veterans to be living with PTSD and military sexual trauma, according to Dr. Darrah Westrup, a clinical psychologist and director of the Women's Mental Health Center.
A total of 3,796 women who left the military since Sept. 11, 2001, and sought VA care were thought to have PTSD, and an additional 500 sought mental services for chemical dependency, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Among all female veterans using VA services, about one in five screened positive for military sexual trauma, roughly 20 times the rate of male veterans.
Seattle Times sports columnist Jerry Brewer continues a series following an 11-year-old girl (daughter of a local high school basketball coach) who has terminal cancer. The latest installment focuses on the community that has gathered around the girl and her family.
Brewer has also been keeping a blog about his reporting for this series ...
(Via Crosscut Seattle)
New York Times reporter Eric Nossiter writes about the "giant slow-motion reconstruction project" taking place in New Orleans ...
A judge has ruled that Northern Ireland police officers with PTSD resulting from duty during the Troubles are now entitled to receive compensation. The ruling came in a class-action suit brought by more than 5,000 current and former officers. Coverage here: BBC News video, AP report.
Last year was a record year for media deaths, but 2007 may be even worse. The International News Safety Institute reports that: "83 journalists and 17 other media professionals have died covering news stories between 1 January and 26 June, compared with 68 at the same time last year ..."
McClatchy reporters Mohammed al Dulaimy and Hannah Allam tell the story of Sheik Fasal al Gaood, a Sunni Muslim tribal leader who was killed along with 11 other Iraqis in a bombing at a Baghdad hotel. "Al Gaood's story," Allam and al Dulaimy note, "mirrors the war itself — a series of shifting alliances, missed opportunities and lives ended in murky circumstances" ...
Washington Post reporters Anne Hull and Dana Priest have continued their investigation of Walter Reed Army Medical Center by focusing on the Army's care for soldier's suffering from PTSD and other mental health problems.
On Monday, June 18, Hull and Priest profiled 20-year-old infantry soldier named Joshua Calloway, a patient in the Walter Reed psychiatric ward ...
In an article about budget problems at a local rape crisis center, Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer reporter Jennifer Calhoun tells the story of one rape victim while outlining the broader impact of rape in her paper's community. Click here to read the story ...
In the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, reporter Charles M. Sennott follows the path of Sally Goodrich, whose son died aboard a hijacked plane on Sept. 11, 2001. To honor her son's memory, Goodrich built a school for girls in Afghanistan. Sennott writes:
It’s a journey that began in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, when the Goodriches’ son Peter, 33, a software developer living in Sudbury with his wife, Rachel, boarded United Airlines Flight 175 bound for California. Peter hated flying and worried his whole life about hijackings. The flight he was on became the second plane that would crash into the twin towers of the World Trade Center.
Four days later, standing in lower Manhattan, a steady rain tamping down the ash and smoke amid those ruins, Don and Sally held each other and wept. It was from the despair and rubble of ground zero that they would embark on a nearly six-year odyssey to honor the memory of their son by responding to the crime of terrorism the way they believe Peter would have wanted them to. But getting to that place of understanding would first take them down into terrifying depths, where they felt everything was lost. That is, until they found themselves at a turning point that would draw them to the place from which the September 11 attacks were authored.
The Department of Defense has released its latest study of the mental health of soldiers and marines in Iraq. The fourth Mental Health Advisory Team report (MHAT-IV; "emm hat four"), among other findings, confirms that multiple and lengthened deployments for soldiers and marines are causing increased mental health problems for troops.
The Collegiate Daily, the student newspaper at Virginia Tech, began its coverage of last week's tragedy with a two-line report posted at 9:47 a.m., Monday, April 16:
Shots were fired on campus in West Ambler Johnson Hall in the early morning hours.
The Collegiate Times is currently investigating the story. More information will be posted as it is made available.
The Daily's coverage of massacre and its aftermath (which E&P's Joe Strupp has suggested be nominated for a Pulitzer) can be found here. The first post about the shootings can be found at the bottom of this page.
In a first-person story, Los Angeles Times reporter Borzou Daragahi describes his four-and-a-half years covering the war in Iraq ...
Monday morning, a female staff member was murdered in her University of Washington office by her ex-boyfriend, against whom she had filed a restraining order. In Thursday's Seattle Times, Sanjay Bhatt reports that University officials had apparently not followed safety procedures put in place after a similar tragedy in 2000 ...
Six months after a historic election, and less than a month before the United Nations peacekeeping mission is set to end, people in the Democratic Republic of Congo are still facing violence and uncertainty. This week we highlight the work of four reporters who have been filing stories from Congo:
Stephanie Hanes reports for The Christian Science Monitor about the UN Mission ...
Eddy Isango reports for the Associated Press, and Joe Bavier reports for Reuters, about recent armed clashes between Congo's army and fighters loyal to rebel leader Jean-Pierre Bemba ...
Jeffrey Gettleman, in the New York Times, takes a broad look at conditions in Congo after taking a "1,200-mile trip across the country — by plane, truck, motorbike, hiking boots and dugout canoe" ...
The Independent's Andrew Buncombe visits New Orleans 18 months after Hurricane Katrina and finds that the city "has barely begun to recover."
ABC News' Bob Woodruff--wounded last year by a roadside bomb in Iraq--tells the story of his own recovery from traumatic brain injury and visits veterans suffering from similar injuries.
On All Things Considered, NPR's Melissa Block visits Shoemaker High School in Killeen, Texas, where "about 90 percent of the 2,000 students ... have at least one parent in the military."
The Los Angeles Times this month launched a new blog--"The Homicide Report"--that documents every homicide in L.A. County. This is an attempt, the blog's author Jill Leovy writes, "to reverse an age-old paradox of big-city crime reporting, which dictates that only the most unusual and statistically marginal homicide cases receive press coverage, while those cases at the very eye of the storm -- those which best expose the true statistical dimensions of the problem of deadly violence -- remain hidden."
More: On the Media's Brooke Gladstone interviews Leovy.
The Crimes of War Project is accepting applications for "an intensive one-day training workshop for mid-career professional journalists on the laws of armed conflict and how they apply in the circumstances of contemporary warfare." The workshop is scheduled for March 28, 2007, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. More information here.
Associated Press correspondent Alfred de Montesquiou reports on recent violence against refugees from Darfur in Chad. He writes:
At least 230,000 ethnic Africans have fled Darfur to take refuge in camps in neighboring Chad -- and their numbers are growing. But the refugees crowded into 12 camps are facing increased tensions with Chadians in a competition for scarce resources in the large, barren border region.
The friction comes despite the fact that both the refugees and the Chadians belong to tribes that straddle the border.
In the Guardian, Michael Howard reports from Baghdad about the emotional toll the war is taking on Iraqi children. After describing a game in which a young boy is pulled from a toy car by a group of make-believe insurgents who then pretend to slit their playmate's throat, Howard writes:
Abdul-Muhammad and his five younger brothers, aged between six and 12, should have been at school. But their mother, Sayeeda, like thousands of parents in Iraq's perilous capital city, now keeps her boys at home. Three weeks ago, armed men had intercepted their teacher's car at the school gates, then hauled him out and slit his throat. Just like in their game.
"That day they came home and they were changed because of the things they'd seen," said Sayeeda as she ladled rice into the boys' bowls. "The youngest two have been wetting their beds and having nightmares, while Abdul-Muhammad has started bullying and ordering everyone to play his fighting games. I know things are not normal with them. My fear is one day they will get hold of real guns. But in these times, where is the help?"
On NPR's Day to Day, Xeni Jardin visits Guatemala, where people are trying to recover from decades of civil war and the damage caused by Hurricane Stan in 2005.
In the LA Weekly, David Zahniser reports on homicide in Los Angeles, and officials' efforts to make the city safer. Zahniser profiles several who were killed in LA in 2006, including 17-year-old Chris Castellanos:
The slaying of Chris Castellanos was the first truly horrific murder of 2006, the type of killing that sends a chill through any parent waiting for a child to come home from the market or the movies or the mall. It happened at 10 a.m. on a busy boulevard. Witnesses were plentiful — one in a parking lot, another in a car. Castellanos had one dollar and two quarters and, prosecutors say, died because he didn’t give them up.
...
The death of Castellanos, who had written about going to college and possibly becoming a doctor, earned no mention in the Los Angeles Times. NBC Channel 4 aired the standard helicopter shot of the crime scene and news of Torres’ arrest. But then, there would always be another homicide in Los Angeles — 477 more in 2006, to be exact. And quietly, the effects of the January 3 killing metastasized, spreading poison far beyond the corner of Whittier and Boyle.
New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman has filed a number of reports from Somalia on fighting between the recently established transitional government--which has been aided by the Ethiopian and U.S. military--and Islamist forces.
A January 12 story is accompanied online by an audio "Back Story" interview with Gettleman, who explains the past weeks' events. In a January 18 story, Gettleman profiles a 22-year-old wounded militiaman:
MOGADISHU, Somalia, Jan. 18 — A week ago, Yoonis Issay Alin was riding around in the back of a pickup, part of a squad of tough-looking guys with big trucks and big guns.
Now he is drooling on a metal cot, shot in the head over a parking spot.
All around him at Medina Hospital in Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, young men writhe in steamy beds, their arms and legs trapped in traction ropes, their gunshot wounds the latest proof of a society out of control. It is hard to imagine there is enough gauze in this broken-down country to keep up.
Somalia may be at a turning point, with a potentially viable government for the first time since 1991. But senseless violence is still the norm, as ubiquitous as qat, the plant people here chew and chew as a drug until the ugliness of life fades away, even if just for a moment.
Brendan Nicholson, a Baghdad correspondent for The Age of Melbourne, Australia, describes--in less than 400 words--an important mental health program recently implemented by the Australian Defence Force.
Charleston Gazette reporter Tara Tuckwiller interviews family members of the miners who died a year ago in the Sago mine disaster. The family members, Tuckwiller reports, are concerned about "deep-seated problems with mine safety and the coal industry in general" that "are being brushed aside by state investigators’ theories about lightning igniting the explosion."
In 2006, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 32 journalists were killed in Iraq. This was "the deadliest year for the press in a single country that the Committee to Protect Journalists has ever recorded." Click here for the complete analysis.
Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer April Saul reports on the 24 children killed by gunfire in the eight-county Philadelphia region during 2006. Saul writes:
Nearly half appear to have been killed mistakenly - in gun accidents or by assailants aiming at others.
Almost all the rest were shot because of jealousy or perceived disrespect, or disputes over turf, drugs or girls.
"Is it just expected for the children to kill each other with guns?" asks Israe Gilliard. In July, her nephew Jarrett Gore, 15, was preparing to settle an argument with fists when he was shot by an acquaintance.
Long after rain washes the blood from the sidewalks of the city, after kids are placed in their coffins, and after T-shirts dedicated to the memory of "Mook" and "Goub" and "Gussie" are tucked away in dresser drawers - what, then, for those who loved them?
McClatchy reporters Hannah Allam and Laith Hammoudi describe their recent trip to Muqtada al-Sadr's headquarters for western Baghdad. The reporters happened to be there when a group of about 50 gunmen stormed the headquarters, initiating an armed standoff with Mahdi Army militiamen. Allam and Hammoudi write:
The groups walked toward each other as if in a high-noon duel. A voice from the crowd called for blessings in the name of Islam's Prophet Muhammad. Sadr's soldiers began to shout age-old prayers for the prophet and his descendants, then added the Sadr camp's innovation: "Bring salvation soon, and damn their enemies!"
With the air filled with the clicking sound of weapons being prepared, visiting McClatchy journalists fled.
NPR's Daniel Zwerdling talks to several soldiers and veterans at Fort Carson, Colo., who say the Army did not properly handle their mental-health problems. Zwerdling reports:
The Army boasts of having great programs to care for soldiers. The Pentagon has sent therapists to Iraq to work with soldiers in the field. And at Army bases in the United States, mental-health units offer individual and group therapy, and counseling for substance abuse. But soldiers say that in practice, the mental-health programs at Ft. Carson don’t work the way they should.
In The Independent, David McKittrick reports on a group of citizens who are attempting to reach reconciliation in Northern Ireland. The group includes people from all sides of the conflict. McKittrick writes:
For two years, behind closed doors, they have united to tackle one of the most deep-seated, difficult and potentially dangerous issues: how to help in healing the thousands of people on whom the Troubles inflicted emotional lacerations.
San Francisco Chronicle reporter Anna Badkhen tells the story of civilian workers in Iraq. Many are suffering from combat trauma, but they lack the support systems available to military personnel. Badkhen writes:
No one knows how many of them have been injured and killed. No one keeps track of how many contractors there are in Iraq. And when they come back, many find themselves abandoned.
"Nobody ain't doing nothing for us," said Thompson, 43, who for six months in 2004 drove a supply truck in Iraq for Halliburton subsidiary KBR, the largest corporate contractor in Iraq.
Thompson was paid $1,850 a week while he was there -- far more than he had been earning before the war. "And I'll tell you right now, it wasn't worth it," he said.
Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal editorial page editor Anthony Ronzio reports on World War Two veterans who attend group therapy sessions at a Vet Center. Many of these veterans have only recently sought treatment for their combat-related psychological injuries ...
At a recent event at London's Frontline Club, the psychiatrist Anthony Feinstein, author of the book "Journalists under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War," spoke with BBC correspondent Allan Little about the emotional impact war has on the people reporting it and the lack of support from news agencies.
Christian Science Monitor correspondent Katharine Houreld reports from Tine, Sudan, a town on the border between Darfur and Chad. Houreld reports that the Sudanese government has apparently remobilized the janjaweed militias, despite a peace agreement signed last May. Houreld writes:
Once home to 70,000 people, Tine has been emptied by a series of bombing raids and Sudanese government attacks over the past two years. Today, its terrified inhabitants huddle on the other side of a dry riverbed under flimsy stick-and-plastic shelters in a camp that marks the border with Chad. From just a few hundred yards away, they watch their abandoned adobe homes collapse with the passing seasons.
In a four-part series, Boston Globe reporter Thomas Farragher and photographer Dina Rudic profile the soldiers who made up "Chaos 4," a three-man squad that patrolled the road to Baghdad International Airport. One of the men was killed during a nightly patrol in October 2004.
New Orleans Times-Picayune columnist Chris Rose tells about his decision to seek mental health treatment after his journey "to the edge of the post-Katrina abyss." He writes:
Today, I can bring my kids to school in the morning and mingle effortlessly with the other parents. Crowds don't freak me out. I'm not tired all day, every day. I love going to the grocery store. I can pump gas. I notice the smell of night-blooming jasmine and I play with my kids and I clean up after my dog and the simplest things, man -- how had they ever gotten so hard?
Great Falls (Mont.) Tribune projects editor Eric Newhouse profiles the 163rd Infantry Battalion, a Montana National Guard unit that was deployed to Iraq in 2004 and 2005.
BBC correspondent Barbara Plett visits Badhiara, Kashmir, one year after the earthquake that killed 75,000 in Pakistan and India.
An article in this month's American Journal of Psychiatry studies the mental health of American veterans who were injured in Iraq or Afghanistan. Veterans were surveyed three times: one month, four months and seven months after deployment. The authors report that rates of PTSD and depression were higher after each interval.
At one month after deployment, 4.2 percent met criteria for PTSD; 4.4 percent met criteria for depression; 2.0 percent met criteria for both PTSD and depression.
Seven months after deployment, 12 percent met criteria for PTSD; 9.3 percent met criteria for depression; 6.3 percent met criteria for both PTSD and depression.
The study found a high level of variability in the course and onset of PTSD and depression. Half of the veterans with PTSD or depression at one month no longer met criteria for the disorders at seven months. Half of the veterans who met criteria for the disorders at seven months had not done so at one month.
In the Philadelphia Inquirer, reporter Michael Vitez tells the story of an incest survivor.
In an excerpt from his book, Blood Brothers, Time magazine reporter Michael Weisskopf writes candidly about having his right hand blown off by a grenade while working in Iraq, and the long process of his recovery. He also profiles three amputees he met in Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Ward 57--also known as "amputee alley."
Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Moni Basu profiles a father whose son was killed a year ago in Iraq. The AJC included this note about the story:
AJC reporter Moni Basu was in Iraq, embedded with the Georgia Army National Guard's 48th Brigade Combat Team when Sgt. Michael Stokely was killed. On Aug. 19, 2005, she covered his memorial service in Mahmudiyah. After reading Basu's story, Michael's father, Robert Stokely, contacted her. Over the next 12 months, Basu exchanged e-mails with him and, after the brigade's return in May, documented his life without his son. This story is a result of her observations and interviews.
Institute for War and Peace Reporting contributor Sahar Al-Haidery reports on what some fear may be a "lost generation" of children in Iraq. Al-Haidery writes:
Almost half of Iraq’s population is under 18, and the daily violence they have witnessed – not only on television but on the streets – has had a devastating impact on their lives and well-being.Three wars since 1980, population displacement, the loss of family members, car bombs, suicide attacks and the constant presence of troops, tanks and guns are taking their toll on the mental welfare of the younger generation.Though it is hard to obtain exact data on the number of children affected, an April 2003 report by the United Nations children’s agency UNICEF estimated that half a million Iraqi children were traumatised by conflict.
Al-Haidery also notes that Iraqi children are often themselves the target of violence:
A report issued by Iraq’s education ministry earlier this year stated that 64 children had been killed and 57 injured in 417 attacks on schools within a four-month period. More than 47 youngsters were kidnapped on their way to or from school in the same period. The report also noted that 311 teachers and government employees had been killed and another 158 wounded in attacks.
A roundup of Sept. 11 Anniversary stories--from the New York Times, Baltimore Sun, WUSA9-TV, Newsday and the Columbus Dispatch ...
The New York Times reprises its much-praised "Portraits of Grief" series by interviewing family members of some of the victims:
Their families have now had five years to reflect, to mourn, to recover. Interviews with a sampling of them found that, while they were at markedly different stages in the healing process, many have found constructive ways of embracing life without forgetting. Widows and widowers have remarried. Children have gone on to college or begun first grade. Some people have settled into new homes, new geography. And a few, while still struggling with their loss, have arrived at surprising places that they could never have foreseen.
Baltimore Sun reporter David Wood (a Dart Center Ochberg Fellow) talks to employees at the Pentagon:
"I just can't be around for the Sept. 11 anniversary; it freaks me out," said one longtime Pentagon employee who asked not to be identified. "I'd go get counseling but I'm afraid for my security clearance."
Like thousands of others, her job requires her to have that clearance and, rightly or wrongly, she feels that seeking professional help would jeopardize her next background investigation.
WUSA9's Mike Walter (also an Ochberg Fellow) recalls witnessing the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon.
In the five years that have passed I’ve been interviewed by Japanese journalists and German journalists. You name it, they’ve talked to me. Through it all, I have done the interviews and recounted what happened to me that day, and what I saw. I asked my wife a few days after the attack, "Why did I have to be there? Why did God put me there?" She replied, "Because you needed to be there to tell the story."
Newsday writer Dave Marcus reports on the long-term effects of trauma on children:
Therapists who saw the first wave of children after the collapse of the World Trade Center made sure that the kids felt safe. Now they are seeing a second wave of young faces - children whose parents worked in lower Manhattan and lost a job after Sept. 11, or who got divorced or moved because of the stress.
Joe Hallett, of the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch, visits the fire station of Squad 41 in the Bronx and talks with "current and former Squad 41 firefighters, widows and their children, surviving parents and in-laws" after a memorial service
In the Columbia Journalism Review, Eric Umansky tells the story of the news media’s fitful coverage of the abuse and torture of U.S. detainees. Among other landmarks, he notes Charles Hanley’s November 2003 story for The Associated Press, for which Hanley interviewed six released Abu Ghraib detainees who gave credible accounts of “humiliation and abuse.” Umansky writes:
Hanley’s story garnered almost no notice when it appeared in November 2003, except overseas. The most prominent attention, Hanley recalls, was in Stern, the German weekly. “After I published,” he says, “I assumed other people would follow up. That’s what really surprised me.”
For his CJR story, Umansky spoke with a number of reporters who have covered this beat. Jane Mayer, of the New Yorker, told Umansky: “Journalists will do incredible work and it just drops into a great black void.”
WSB-TV Atlanta reporter Alison Burns interviewed former Georgia senator Max Cleland in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., where Cleland discussed the treatment he is receiving for recently diagnosed Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Click here for the story and video.
Washington Post reporter Donna St. George tells the story of Trinette Johnson, an Iraq War veteran suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. St. George summarizes the latest research on how trauma affects men and women and she describes the challenges facing female veterans. St. George writes:
For women who are mothers, combat-related PTSD may have added significance. Often, after war, "it's not the same mommy who left," said Yale University associate professor Laurie Harkness, who runs a Veterans Affairs mental health clinic in Connecticut. Although the same can be said for fathers, she said, "mothers in general are the emotional hub of a family."
A report published Friday in the journal Science has found "very little evidence of falsification" by Vietnam veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The researchers selected a sample of 260 participants from the 1988 National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (based on data from surveys of 1,200 veterans) and used military records to verify traumatic events reported by the veterans.
The authors of the new study also found rates of PTSD that differed from the NVVRS estimates. The NVVRS found that 15.2 percent of veterans had PTSD at the time of the study; 30.9 had PTSD at some point during their lifetime. The new analysis finds 9.1 percent with a "current" diagnosis and 18.7 percent with a "lifetime" diagnosis.
Dr. Matthew J. Friedman, executive director of the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for the Department of Veterans Affairs (and a member of the Dart Center advisory council), told New York Times reporter Benedict Carey that "We can quibble about the numbers but the point is that it’s a lot of people." Harvard psychologist Richard McNally--a long-time and outspoken critic of the NVVRS estimates--said that the new numbers "should not be used as a justification for short-changing services that are needed to help veterans." (Click here for an NPR report about the new study.)
UPDATE (Friday, 11:30 am): The study (subscription required) goes a long way toward refuting critics who claim that the NVVRS PTSD-prevalence estimates are inflated by the fraudulent claims of benefit-seeking veterans. Using military records, military histories and newspaper accounts, the authors report that they were able to confirm "the exposure to traumatic stressors of most of the subsample veterans."
The authors also examined the "conundrum" frequently cited by critics of the NVVRS: only 15 percent of troops in Vietnam were classified as having "combat exposure" but 30.9 percent eventually had PTSD. The authors were able to establish that "non-combat" soldiers in Vietnam were, in fact, exposed to significant, verifiable stressors. The authors found a strong relationship (stronger than was identified by the NVVRS, in fact) between PTSD symptoms and exposure to war-zone stressors, which the authors note is a "relationship that cannot be due to biases in self-reports of exposure."
The authors also address the disparity between the PTSD prevalence figures of the NVVRS and those of the Centers for Disease Control study, which "reported rates of 14.7% lifetime PTSD and 2.2% current PTSD 11 to 12 years after the Vietnam war ended." This disparity, the authors say, is not due to flaws in the NVVRS (as critics have contended) but because the CDC used a partial version of a survey that has since been found to underestimate PTSD. The authors explain:
The CDC used about half of the items from a newly developed module from the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) to diagnose lifetime and current PTSD on the basis of responses to closed questions asked by lay interviewers. This version of the DIS PTSD module has been found to diagnose much lower rates of PTSD in the general population than the other diagnostic instrument that is most widely used by lay interviewers. Against this background, it is not surprising that the abbreviated CDC adaptation of the DIS PTSD module was found in the NVVRS to miss 78% of veterans who had diagnosable PTSD, according to the SCID clinicians. These results suggest that PTSD is under-diagnosed in both military and civilian samples when this version of DIS PTSD is used.
The authors conclude:
The message from the NVVRS has been that the Vietnam War took a severe psychological toll on U.S. veterans. Our results provide compelling reasons to take this message seriously.
UPDATE 2 (Friday, 3:00 pm): Why are the rates of PTSD in this new study lower than the NVVRS rates?
Seven veterans with PTSD were removed from the sample group: "four veterans with prewar onset, two missing onset information, and one missing sampling weight." Once these seven were removed from the analysis, "unadjusted" rates of PTSD were found (22.5 percent "lifetime"; 12.2 percent "current"). Then, these rates were adjusted for "impairment of functioning" (the current criteria require that symptoms cause a certain level of impairment before PTSD can be diagnosed; the criteria in place at the time of the NVVRS did not) and "documentation of exposure" (eight veterans in the sample group with PTSD reported stressors that could not be confirmed by independent sources; of these eight, the authors write, "Record information was contradictory for only two").
One point likely to be noted by critics of this study is the exclusion of veterans with prewar onset of PTSD. A prewar diagnosis doesn't necessarily invalidate a war-time stressor. The authors do not reveal whether those veterans' re-experiencing symptoms (nightmares, flashbacks) are of the prewar trauma, or of the war-zone trauma. If the nightmares and flashbacks of a veteran with a prewar diagnosis were mainly of war-time stressors, it would be hard to say that veteran's PTSD was not "war-related."
In the early years of World War One, "Shell Shocked" soldiers were thought to be suffering physical damage to the brain or nervous system brought on by the atmospheric force of exploding shells. After study, however, mental health practitioners realized that most victims of "Shell Shock" were in fact suffering a psychological disorder brought on by the stress of combat. It was also deduced that many soldiers charged with cowardice or desertion were also suffering a combat stress reaction.
The development of this understanding--along with new, more effective treatment methods--was of great benefit to soldiers in the Allied armies during the last years of the war. But these discoveries came too late for the 306 British soldiers executed (shot at dawn) for cowardice or desertion during the Great War.
Now, after a long campaign by families of the victims, the British government has announced that it will posthumously pardon the 306 soldiers. Des Browne, the Secretary of Defence, said in a statement: "Although this is a historical matter, I am conscious of how the families of these men feel today. They have had to endure a stigma for decades. That makes this a moral issue too, and having reviewed it, I believe it is appropriate to seek a statutory pardon."
For more about the history of combat stress and military psychiatry, read "Psychiatric Lessons of War," the first chapter of the Army's War Psychiatry textbook.
In the final installment of a three-part series, Chicago Tribune reporters Carolyn Starks and John Keilman detail a boy's difficult recovery from a pit-bull attack. While the first two installments focused more on 10-year-old Nick Foley's physical injuries, the third explores the emotional and psychological challenges facing Foley, his family and others involved.
In the Dayton Daily News this week, a four-part series by reporters Laura A. Bischoff and Mary McCarty about a man falsely convicted of murdering his mother-in-law and raping his niece. The web package includes information about how the story was reported and videos of interviews with key sources. (Note: free registration required to read stories at daytondailynews.com.)
Are depression, anxiety and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder useful concepts when applied to non-Western cultures? Or are they--as some critics have contended--simply Western cultural constructs?
Two studies recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association offer the beginnings of an answer to these questions.
One study focused on post-tsunami mental health reactions among adults, the other study looked at children.
In an accompanying commentary, Derrick Silove and Richard Bryant note that "The ongoing controversy risks confusing funding agencies and other donors, as well as those responsible for planning mental health programs as part of humanitarian relief efforts following disasters." The two studies, Silove and Bryant write:
... add to a growing body of research indicating that PTSD symptoms can be identified both in adults and in children across cultures. The key question, however, is whether the prevalence of PTSD symptoms in the immediate aftermath of disasters offers valid information and reliable direction to guide local mental health planning.
Both studies identify cultural factors may help people cope with trauma. In the study of adults, the authors write:
The Buddhist component of the Thai belief system, for instance, contemplates that life is to a certain extent predetermined and the result of one's own actions or karma. This belief may help Buddhists accept and overcome negative events occurring during the course of their lives, which would be consistent with findings from other studies showing a protective effect of the Buddhist religion on anxiety and depression.
Another aspect of the Thai belief system is the notion that every space, be it air or water, has a ruler or spirit, a supernatural power that governs the space. For individuals to share the space, the ruler needs to be informed and pleased and its territory must be respected. Anecdotal conversations with tsunami survivors indicate that many individuals believe that overfishing and exploitation of the sea were causes of the tsunami, a revenge of the spirits of the sea. The notion of carrying a certain responsibility for the occurrence of the tsunami may make it easier to accept and cope with its consequences.
In the survey of adults, about 10 percent reported seeing a ghost after the tsunami. The authors explain:
Reports of seeing or hearing ghosts are common among rural Thais and are not confined to periods of disaster or specific events but are a normal part of Thai culture and beliefs. Hence, in most cases this phenomenon should be interpreted in the context of the local belief system and as a culturally specific way of coping with death and reincarnation rather than a symptom of mental illness.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this week finds that, in some Army veterans, deployment to the Iraq War is associated with increased confusion and tension, a shortened attention span, and impaired memory. The study, led by Jennifer Vasterling of the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System, also found that combat veterans had faster reaction time compared to Army personnel who hadn't served in Iraq. (News coverage here: LA Times, Psychiatric Times.)
In an accompanying editorial, Matthew Hotopf and Simon Wessely note that the neurological changes cited above are described by the researchers as "mild" and "subtle."
Hotopf and Wessely suggest that the findings support the conception of post-deployment mental health problems as "the persistence on return home of some of the psychological adaptations required during deployment." They write:
The term battlemind captures the way in which deployed military personnel develop ways of adapting that are appropriate and helpful when vigilance is required, decisions have to be taken quickly, targeted aggression is appropriate, and emotional control is essential. Many returning veterans report difficulties switching from these normal responses to the responses required at home. The finding that veterans had improved reaction times provides a clue: it would be unlikely for a pathological process caused by neurotoxins to improve reaction time. Continued hypervigilance provides a more plausible explanation. The nature of the scores that changed on the Profile of Mood States is another clue in that veterans experienced an increase in anxiety symptoms (feeling "tense" or "on edge") as well as confusion (feeling "bewildered" or "muddled"). Although these phenomena may have some similarities to PTSD, they are perhaps better considered as essentially normal coping experiences, which may perhaps influence neuropsychological function.
Albuquerque Tribune reporter Casey Philips visits a "talking circle" at the Albuquerque Veteran Affairs Medical Center, where American Indian veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder meet twice each month. Philips goes beyond the usual visit-to-a-PTSD-group story by examining relevant cultural factors (the "talking circle" format draws on American Indian traditions) and explaining the benefits of group support.
The story includes an in-depth discussion with the group's facilitator, VA psychologist James Gillies, and several moving accounts from veterans:
"People like stories that have a beautiful ending, but none of the stuff we're here for has a beautiful ending," said Thomas Bitsie, 59, a Navajo from Shiprock who said he lost his religion to alcohol after watching too many friends die during combat.
"The only thing that war determines, I suppose, is who's left. I put up with it, but I needed a lot of cooling off, and I did it with a Coors Lite."
People diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder may experience age-related memory problems earlier than non-traumatized people, according to research summarized on nature.com. In a study of Holocaust survivors, Mount Sinai School of Medicine researcher Rachel Yehuda found that even those who had recovered from emotional trauma were more likely to suffer memory problems later in life than members of a control group. The full study is in press at Biological Psychiatry.
Steve Chambers of the New Jersey Star-Ledger reported Sunday on the effects of war on children in the Middle East. Reporting from Nahariya, Israel, Chambers examines the most stressful and potentially traumatizing aspects of combat, and draws from mental health experts to consider how parents can ease children's fears.
Children on both sides are at risk, Chambers writes:
THE WAR IS being fought on two fronts, so children are suffering not only in northern Israel, where Hezbollah rockets rain down, and in southern Lebanon, where the Israelis are striking suspected Hezbollah targets. Farther south, there are more young witnesses to war in Palestinian-controlled Gaza, where hostilities began last month after Palestinian gunmen killed two Israeli soldiers and captured another.
In central Gaza, where Israelis and Palestinians fought pitched battles in the streets last week, parents said it was virtually impossible to reassure children who regularly witness death...
The National Council on Disability has issued a report on the treatment of people with psychiatric disabilities during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The NCD is quite critical of disaster relief agencies, particularly the Red Cross. (Click here for coverage by AP reporter Kevin Freking.)
In a press release, the NCD listed the report's major findings:
• In violation of federal policy and law, people with psychiatric disabilities were discriminated against during evacuation, rescue, and relief phases
• Mismanaged evacuations resulted in the loss, mistreatment, and inappropriate institutionalization of people with psychiatric disabilities
• People with psychiatric disabilities were not included in disaster planning or relief and recovery efforts
• Disaster management efforts often failed because no individual or office had responsibility, accountability, and authority for disability related issues
• Disaster plans were shortsighted and relief services were terminated prematurely
Click here for the full report, which includes recommendations for future disasters.
In an article on a new trauma helpline launched throughout Scotland, Herald reporter Beth Pearson explains the need for such resources by telling the story of accident survivor Lynn Harper and through interviews with mental health advocates, including David Alexander, director of the Aberdeen Trauma Research Center (ATRC).
A LOT OF people, when they've had a bad accident, think: 'Well, I'm not dead, I should pull my socks up' and feel they don't deserve or need treatment. Then some months down the line, which often puzzles their GP, they come forward requiring some form of professional help.
In the Toronto Globe and Mail, Anne McIlroy writes a lengthy story about experiments using drugs known as beta blockers to protect against Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Researchers are testing whether the drugs can alter traumatic memories by limiting production of stress hormones. McIlroy notes several of the ethical questions involved.
In the Times of London, Dilip Premachandran and Daniel McGrory tell the story of one of the victims of last week's train bombings in Mumbai (which the Times insists on calling "Bombay").
HE IS known to all India as the Unknown Boy. He has not uttered a word since he was carried into Bhagwati Hospital, a victim of the last of the seven bombs that tore apart Bombay’s rush-hour trains.
Nobody has reported him missing, nor have any of the scores of survivors who trawl the city’s hospitals still looking for friends or family recognised the boy with no name.
Two brothers, ages 14 and 20, were killed by their father Sunday night in Washington Township, N.J. Today, the staff of The Record (of Hackensack, N.J.) gives extensive coverage to the tragedy:
"Questions amid the shock"Why?
It makes no sense to Thomas Frazza's neighbors, or to John and Kevin Frazza's friends, or to the neighbor who remembers the Frazza family laughing as they walked to the beach from their summer home. ...
"Student's fun-loving spirit was his hallmark"
A day after John Frazza's grisly death -- at the hands of his own father, -- his friends clung fiercely to memories of the Ramapo College student as a do-gooder and jokester. ...
"Quick with a joke, skilled with hockey stick"
Kevin Frazza loved hockey, classic rock music and junk food.
He was sweet and funny, a happy 14-year-old who was as well-liked by his peers as he was by his teachers. ...
"In one stark moment, online diaries turn digital memorials"
John Frazza's page at the social networking site facebook.com identifies him as a fan of "Family Guy," and "Lord of the Rings."
That page and a similar profile at myspace.com sketch a portrait of a typical 20-year-old obsessed with typical things: music, sports, girls.
But the tone of the pages took a sudden somber turn Tuesday as word spread that Frazza and his brother, Kevin, 14, had been fatally shot by their father overnight. ...
A report from the Institute of Medicine, commissioned by the Department of Veterans Affairs, has affirmed that guidelines for diagnosing and assessing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Volume IV, are legitimate.
This finding would seem to be obvious, but it represents a victory for veterans groups, who had viewed the VA's request for the report as an attempt to undermine veterans' PTSD-related disability claims. (Click here for background from VA Watchdog's Larry Scott.)
Here is the IOM statement:
At the request of the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Institute of Medicine conducted a study on Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The committee reviewed and commented on the diagnosis and assessment of PTSD and known risk factors for its development.
The committee found that PTSD is a well characterized medical disorder and that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) criteria for diagnosing PTSD are evidence-based, widely accepted, and widely used.
According to the committee’s report, PTSD should be diagnosed and assessed by a health professional with experience in diagnosing psychiatric disorders (e.g., primary care physicians, nurses, social workers) using the DSM-IV criteria. Ideally, this diagnosis should take place in a private setting with a face-to-face interview that can last an hour or more.
Additionally, while screening and diagnostic instruments might help in the diagnosis and assessment of PTSD, these tools cannot substitute for an evaluation by an experienced professional.
The committee wrote that because all veterans deployed to a war zone are at risk for the development of PTSD, it would be prudent for health professionals to query veterans about their wartime experiences and their symptoms, when presenting at primary care and other health facilities (inpatient or outpatient).
In the Washington Post Sunday Magazine, reporter DeNeen L. Brown tells the story of Valencia Mohammed, a woman investigating the murder of her sons. Brown writes:
WHAT IS A MOTHER TO DO when two of her sons are shot to death in the District of Columbia, where so many young black boys have been slain in the past decades, one after the other? Enough black boys over the years to fill so many school buses, so many classrooms, vanished like a vanishing tribe?
What is a mother to do when she doesn't think police are moving fast enough? What is a mother to do when her son's so-called friends go silent, won't tell the truth to police, although they saw it all -- right there on Rittenhouse Street, that bright sunny day, 4:30 in the afternoon, rush hour, Thursday, October 28, 2004, watching the killer pump bullets into her son as if he were a target in a video game? When her son sits dying in the driver's seat, engine running, driver's door wide open, loaded .380 semiautomatic pistol on his body, bullet wounds in his chest and neck? People see it, and people close their blinds.
Read the whole story here.
