TRANSCRIPT
“This is a city in fear. Where temperatures are taken several times a day by its frightened citizens. Where checkpoints guard who comes in and out of the capital. Where the reminder of the invisible virus is everywhere. We joined the men and women on the front line of the Ebola crisis. Collecting Liberia's Ebola dead.”
On the 23rd of March, 2014, Guinea in West Africa declared an outbreak of Ebola.
“Listen to that sound. The wailing you hear is not just the relatives grieving but a community realising there's Ebola in its midst, and they are all now at risk.”
Ebola outbreaks had been known to be dangerous but small.
And it happened in a place in the world where no one expected Ebola, in an area that didn’t interest the authorities, and no one was ready to deal with it.
The outbreak lasted two years, and took more than 11,000 lives.
Nick Ludlam was there.
“The first 24 hours of the first Ebola trip we went on we weren't quite as scrupulously careful as we probably should have been, which left us reeling when we realized you have to get into the groove a little bit. Essentially you get up, you have to wash your hand before and after every doorknob you touch. You have to be careful of everything you eat. You have to check all your gear, you have to have all your supplies. Most of the days were spent going out into the towns and into the communities and the villages and looking for Ebola victims. People who have survived Ebola, whether it's a group of kids in a shack who are now orphaned, their parents or parent died in the bed they're sleeping in. I suppose for me it was keeping an eye on my team, constantly being aware of your surroundings, what you're touching. There's this hyper-vigilance all the time about everything.”
Nick spent over 10 years of his career travelling the world, covering some of the most confronting situations you could think of.
Beginning his career in Washington DC, he's worked in the United Kingdom, Africa, Syria and Iraq - just to name a few.
In this episode of History's First Draft, we'll address the question - what is the cumulative effect of reporting from crisis zones?
“I started as a freelance sound technician and camera assistant very quickly started producing and it kind of went from there basically. But I was out and about. I was already travelling quite extensively, had done for many years. I grew up living in different parts of the world. I don't remember a time I didn't know that I wanted to travel around the world, which I did as soon as I was able. And then I fell into a job that was all about travelling. It was just a natural progression. I did my degree abroad so everything was kind of that way inclined. So I've never considered anything else. I've never worked in any other part of media other than international news, essentially it's just my thing. Even when I worked in the UK it was doing international news and when I had to do UK news on the rare occasion I did, it was quite terrifying.”
Although he wasn't in front of the camera, Nick played a critical role within his team - with producers often being responsible for overseeing the entire production process, from researching and gathering information to editing and broadcasting the final news segment.
Alongside his reporter and camera operator, he covered every conflict and crisis from where they were stationed, being the first media team into Timbuktu as French paratroopers fell from the sky, to the DRC where they filmed children as young as four mining for cobalt.
They also regularly covered the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, watching the fight against I-S unfold on the front lines in Mosul and Raqqa.
Nick says it can be hard to identify one of these experiences as having been the hardest, with them often moulding together.
“You tend to forget the hard bits I think. And you synthesise a story based on the success or failure of the story that you are doing yourself, and you tend to skip over the traumatic bits. There are flashes of images from lots of different stories. I would say if I think about the hardest bit - decomposing bodies in Ituri province in eastern, DRC in the bush, stepping over dead ISIS fighters in Syria - these are things that are very outside of your scope of reality, normal reality. And I think those sorts of things tend to stand out because you haven't got much of a point of reference for it, you're not seeing it every day. But mostly, especially since I had kids myself, mostly it's things involving trauma to children.”
It's well-known that journalists may witness events involving death, violence and human suffering.
But research suggests these can be particularly disturbing when the events involve children.
“In Ituri Province we were in a village, so it's an area of eastern DRC that saw a lot of violence. A lot of the grownups had fled leaving kids behind. And we were interviewing a crowd in a village that we stopped at and I spotted a little girl, I dunno, five, six, just looking at me through the crowd, through the legs of people who were all trying to voice their concerns and she became our story, our focus. But she had two siblings that she was looking after. She had no food, she was being looked after in the community, but no-one had food so they were not going to get any. So we ended up giving her all the food we had. But it goes to an adult that's supposedly looking after her and they walk off into the distance and you have no idea what's going to happen to them. And that I find really difficult, leaving something like that.”
Processing trauma is a complex and difficult goal requiring space to integrate a traumatic experience into your life story, grieve what you've lost and more forward in a meaningful way.
But what happens when you can't give yourself that space because you have a time-conscious job at hand?
Nick says the times you do process what you're seeing are the most difficult times.
“You do try and keep yourself at a psychological distance because it would be very hard to do both - to be objective, to film, to cover a story, and really empathise fully. I mean, when you are in a room of about 30 or 40 women of all ages who have all been raped at least once, they're all hungry and you know that afterwards you are going to go back to a hotel, fly back home, you're going to have a great story. And yet that great story in that sense of powerful piece of journalism is based on the suffering, the absolute suffering of human beings who have no choice but to be where they are. You do have to keep it to a degree at a distance.”
Research provided by the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma suggests between 80 and 100 per cent of journalists have been exposed to a work-related traumatic event.
Whether it's seeing distressing images on your computer while editing footage or being shot at in a war zone - it all counts and affects them in some way or another.
For Nick, when he's experienced moments more similar to the latter, he says fear often isn't present.
“You don't tend to fear for your life in the moment. Often you don't think until afterwards generally that your life was, I mean you know going into a lot of situations that it's a dangerous situation, you try and minimise as much as possible and afterwards you tend to think, oh, that was a bit dicey. Obviously if you are getting rocketed and there are shells landing all around you, that's quite obvious. But other times you realise - once in Baghdad, we had the US intelligence came over when we were on the base in the evening saying where we'd stopped earlier that day there was a al-Qaeda sniper trained on us from a nearby mosque, but they hadn't got the authorisation to fire. Those sorts of things. After the fact, you think, oh yeah, that was a bit dodgy.”
In extreme cases, post-traumatic stress disorder and burnout can become an issue for journalists, producers or anyone involved in the news coverage process.
One of the top risk factors for PTSD is exposure to a greater number of traumatic assignments, and the frequency of exposure.
But the Dart Centre has found despite that, most journalists exhibit resilience.
That could be thanks to a number of preventative measures - as well as help sought after the fact.
Nick says in the immediate aftermath of returning home after covering a hostile environment, his recovery was speeded up because of advice he'd received from his colleagues.
'The first time I ever went into a hostile environment, a conflict zone, the two guys I went with had done it quite a few times. They were quite experienced and they said to me quite early on, look, when we leave, when you go back, I think we were in Iraq you will be angry and horrible for three or four days. Absolutely right and it's all that adrenaline seeping out of you. Your hyper-vigilance can take a long time to dissipate. You're not ... every car door closing is a potential rocket going off or a bullet. That dissipates after a while. So those are sort of temporary things. When I came back from Ebola, I think the overwhelming feeling was of fear and dread. For me it was a very different type of trauma because fear for myself and what if I had it and dread for giving it to my family.”
After all he's seen, Nick has remained in the media industry, covering international news.
He says he's avoided any long-term issues by seeking help soon after he stopped travelling.
“It tends to condense down to three or four images of different stories that will linger in your mind. For me, in terms of after-effects, it's about having at some point your glass fills up and overflows and if you're not constantly working to keep that glass from overflowing, if you let it, it's very difficult to go back and resolve it. So I ended up having quite a lot of counselling, quite a lot of therapy just to keep myself balanced and to keep myself going. And that helped me a lot. And I think our industry is much better at that nowadays. You have much less concern that it's going to end your career or people are not going to send you out on things. It does stay with you in lots of different ways. Being aware of how it stays with you is really helpful to managing that. So it doesn't come out in all kinds of ways you're not really aware of.”
But there is still more to be done when it comes to awareness and understanding around the mental health of those working in news.
Nick says that lack of awareness even sometimes comes from others in the industry.
“Even a former colleague of mine once asked someone who'd just come back from, this is many years ago, but they'd just come back from western Darfour in the period when the first genocide was happening and they'd spent three months there and this was a senior colleague asked them what hotels they stayed in. There were no hotels, you stayed on mud floors or in people's houses or whatever. But even that level of understanding was lacking in terms of what is involved in going. You end up living with or experiencing life with some of the most horrendously deprived people on the planet, which is both fascinating and amazing and a privilege and traumatic.”
If it's not dealt with, trauma can reduce a person's ability to cope with and handle day-to-day work challenges, making them more prone to being overwhelmed.
But Nick says if it is taken care of, it can also positively influence their work, making them more experienced and well-rounded, with a greater understanding of the work they do.
“I think for what I do now, it informs how I look at a story. It informs how I ask other people to get involved in a story. I will know when something is a trigger and I will step away from it or I will avoid it. And I'm hopefully quite careful to make sure that other people know they can do the same. And I think in this day and age there's a lot, like I say, a lot more sort of sensitivity and understanding around protecting people from that sort of confrontation. Having been through it helps to understand why it's important to protect others from it.”
You’ve been listening to History’s First Draft with me, Ciara Hain.
For more episodes exploring the effects of reporting the news on journalists, follow the podcast on the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
