Advice for Crisis Workers and Journalists With Disaster Stress

If you're curious about how crisis workers, journalists, and soldiers overcome the specific stress of working in war and disaster zones, there is a rapidly growing family of resources. Here's a story for you.

On combat PTSD, you may have seen Ilona Meagher's PTSD Combat Blog and Lily Casura's Healing Combat Trauma Blog. But there is also a nice compendium of knowledge and advice for journalists and aid workers in the new article "Choosing a Psychotherapist," written by Elana Newman for the tremendously helpful Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. For a personal reflection, with encouragement to crisis workers to take this seriously, here's some nuance.

There was a heroic force of an aid worker I used to know overseas who had run logistics for doctors in Rwanda, Burundi, and Somalia in the bloody mid-90s, then ended up retiring to low-risk reconstruction work. He loved to play the tough guy. Sometimes sleeping in the room beside mine, he'd wake me, screaming.

Next day I'd say, "What the Hell?" He'd just pound vodka and sing Oasis and reply, "Nothing. Shut the fuck up." His escape was liquor, women, and calls to his mom. Eventually, he confessed that there was once a canine in Burundi which had dug a hand out of a mass grave and showed up at the door with it clinched in its teeth. He thought he had been dreaming of this dog.

For years, I saw my friend's hero troubles as a kind of foreboding, that running around doing aid work and journalism in war zones might give me the ghosts, too. Of course, I'd finished my time in the military, so I was comforted not to have to consider killing to save.

But over time I did run into enough of the other kinds of war trauma, hiding from military patrols, sleeping in rubble with nearby shelling or shooting, and people close to death. I even lost a few co-workers. In time my dreams all began taking place in a post-apocalyptic landscape, if that's an indicator. It never kept me from having a good time; well, not for a while.

Quincampoix was the street. On a break from aid work in the Chechnya region of southern Russia, I flew to Paris to have a grand time with my girlfriend at the time, A. To this day I believe the main problem was that I was deadly allergic to the upholstery in the room we rented, but something got loose in my head and nearly ruined what should have been a romantic rendezvous.

We tiptoed from the 15th century walk up on Quincampoix along the cobblestone to the Marais. We found truly curious and wonderful cafes. And we talked and talked. But over a series of days I realized I wasn't telling A how wonderful she was. Instead, I was furiously explaining in minute detail about how my Ingush co-workers and I could do more to help more people in Chechnya if it wasn't for the barbs, bricks, and pitfalls strewn about the Caucasus.

Later, I had a dream that someone machine-gunned my Ingush and Chechen co-workers. Somehow I survived. In the morning, I woke early, having slept only a few hours. Too tired through the day to play. A, for her part, was kind. She didn't complain; she just hoped I would recover in time for a few special moments before she got on the plane.

Finally, as we walked through the Louvre I got extremely impatient. A was enjoying every artifact, but somehow I was bored out of my mind, unwilling to focus. Then I suddenly became trapped in a tractor beam of sorts in a large viewing room. I was seized by the Gericault painting, The Raft of Medusa.

Not traditionally a fan of oil painting, I couldn't understand what was so interesting to me about the piece. In the work, about twelve people have survived a shipwreck on a broken scrap of hull. Some are active, waving a nearby ship for help, while others die.

That was the moment I realized that I had to start taking people's advice about sorting out the disaster stress, reading info like that offered on the DART site, and considering options for long-term stress management. It wasn't just about me; it was about A, about my future girlfriend, and about my family.

Now that I've turned the corner, everything is coming around. Of course, what's needed more than a Frontline Club or stress management program is a great set of friends with similar experiences who can share, philosophize, and laugh in context. Realizing one's mortality is not only a deep reckoning, it can also be an opportunity.

Photo credit: Zoriah (A window in Asia)