Dr Lynne Jones has been a psychiatrist working in conflict zones for over 20 years. From treating soldiers in the Bosnian war, to attending to families affected by the Haitian earthquake, or those who lost relatives in the Sri Lankan tsunami, Dr Jones is coming to the Frontline Club to discuss and share her experiences of working in some of the world’s biggest disaster zones. She will be discussing issues such as if there is a right approach to deal with mental health in humanitarian disasters, and is there a different way we approach mental health in crises in third world countries compared to developed ones? Dr Jones’ field diaries have been published in the London Review of Books and her audio diaries broadcast on the BBC World Service.

Joining this discussion is Dr Conor Kenny from Doctors Without Borders. Dr Kenny has been providing healthcare for some of the most vulnerable people in Europe. His first assignment began in Idomeni, a transit camp for refugees on the Greek border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. After residents of the Idomeni camp were evicted, Conor moved to Lesbos to work providing healthcare in specialised camps designated for the most vulnerable refugees on the island. The refugees here face a number of medical and psychosocial problems as a result of their extensive journeys that Dr Kenny has been treating.

Moderator – Rob Williams CEO War Child

Rob Williams is Chief Executive of War Child, the UK charity dedicated to supporting children affected by conflict.  War Child delivers psychosocial support, child protection, education and livelihoods programmes in a range of countries affected by war including Central African Republic, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Jordan, and The Democratic Republic of Congo, helping children who have been abused, abducted, displaced or separated from their families.  Previously in relief and development Rob has worked for Save the Children, the British Red Cross and Concern Worldwide in Africa and Asia leading country programmes and also managing emergency response. In the UK he has been, at various times, Deputy Children’s Commissioner for England, Chief Executive of Bliss – the premature baby charity, and Chief Executive of the Fatherhood Institute He is married with two children and lives in Cambridge.

Click on the link to see Dr Lynne Jones’ new book, Outside the Asylum: A Memoir of War, Disaster and Humanitarian Psychiatry

Theatre of War is an innovative project that presents readings of ancient Greek plays to members of the armed services, veterans, and their families to help them initiate conversations about the visible and invisible wounds of war. We are delighted to welcome the project to the Frontline Club for a special performance for journalists who cover conflict.

Opening with a dramatic reading of Sophocles’ Ajax, an ancient Greek tragedy about the suicide of a great respected warrior, by actors Jason Isaacs, Lesley Sharp and Aidan Kelly, the evening aims to generate dialogue about the unique challenges faced by those who risk their lives to bring the truth of war to light.

Jason Isaacs (Harry Potter, Blackhawk Down, The Green Zone)

Lesley Sharp (The Full Monty, Naked, Clocking Off, Scott & Bailey)

Aidan Kelly (Treasure Island – National Theatre, MacBeth – RSC, and Once – West End)

Following the reading a panel of journalists will give their reaction before opening up to a conversation with the audience.

The panel

Matthew Green has spent the past 14 years working as a correspondent for the Financial Times and Reuters and has reported from more than 30 countries, including Iraq and Afghanistan. He is the author of Aftershock: The Untold Story of Suriving Peace, which documents the post-conflict experience of British soldiers.

Emma Beals is a freelance journalist based in southern Turkey covering Syria and Iraq. She has also reported from DR Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Pakistan. She is a member of the board of representatives for the Frontline Freelance Register (FFR).

Safa Al Ahmad is a Saudi freelance journalist working in print and television. Her focus in the past few years has been the Arabian peninsula, primarily Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Her essay Wishful Thinking was published in the anthology Writing Revolution. She is the recipient of ElMundo’s International Journalism award for 2015.

Theatre of War is founded by writer, director, and translator Bryan Doerries. He is also the co-founder of Outside the Wire, a social-impact company that uses theatre and a variety of other media to address pressing public health and social issues, such as combat-related psychological injury, end-of-life care, prison reform, domestic violence, political violence, recovery from natural and man-made disasters, substance abuse, and addiction. He is author of The Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today.

There’s no getting round it. Female journalists face exceptional risks when reporting events across the world. Especially as freelancers undertaking assignments alone, women must factor the dangers of gender and sexual violence into their assessments of hostile environments.

L-r: Richard Spencer, Alison Baskerville, Elisa Lees Munoz, Nadine Marroushi and Caroline Neil

This was the resounding conclusion of News Reporting and Navigating Risk: Is Gender a Factor? – a panel discussion at the Frontline Club on Tuesday 23 June organised in partnership with the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) and the Frontline Freelance Register (FFR).

IWMF executive director and panel chair Elisa Lees Munoz opened the debate by presenting the results of the foundation’s recent survey of 1000 female journalists, of whom 20% had experienced some form of gender-based violence while on assignment.

“We were pretty horrified by that number,” said Lees Munoz. “But we were also pretty distressed by the fact that the majority of the perpetrators weren’t strangers… but were their colleagues, supervisors, fixers or translators.”

These risks can be difficult to mitigate against, said Caroline Neil, director of hostile environment training providers RPS Partnership.

“The risks that female media workers face are really intangible. The interpersonal relationship between you and your interpreter, fixer or male colleague who might have misconstrued the situation,” said Neil.

“It’s very difficult to mitigate those types of risks because it’s very much around your interpersonal skills, experience and whether you are susceptible.”

But the dangers to women journalists are by no means purely physical, said journalist Nadine Marroushi, who personally suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after being assaulted by a crowd while reporting on protests in Egypt’s Tahrir Square.

Psychological trauma resulting from sexual assault in the field continues to affect women long after the physical scars have healed. Yet PTSD can affect all journalists, regardless of gender, and is an issue the industry needs to urgently address, she added.

“It’s really important for journalists to acknowledge how things are affecting them and to create some kind of space where they can talk about those things,” said Marroushi.

That space just doesn’t exist at the moment, especially for local journalists who aren’t able to get out and get help, said documentary photographer and FFR board member Alison Baskerville.

“We can’t forget about local journalists. It feels like there’s this huge need for us to collaborate with all the knowledge that we have… so that we can educate ourselves and spread that further,” said Baskerville.

L-r: Elisa Lees Munoz, Nadine Marroushi and Caroline Neil

Richard Spencer, Middle East editor at The Telegraph, said that the culture towards mental health within media organisations is developing, with PTSD counselling now on offer for all who work with the paper. But many still fall through the gaps, he said.

“It’s difficult to see who takes responsibility for the longterm mental health of local hires such as translators, who may be working for fifty different places,” he said. “The policy is there, but the gaps for those who fall between them are very large.”

Excellent event @frontlineclub on the risks faced by women reporting in the field #journoselfcare – http://t.co/LucJzEmPCy

— Brian_Condon (@brian_condon) June 23, 2015

Chair Lees Munoz, who is helping to develop a call for international guidelines on hiring freelancers, told the Frontline Club audience that the IWMF is lobbying to include a clause for a no-tolerance policy on gender violence perpetrated by media employees.

She also stressed the need for international databases of trusted fixers and translators, global hostile environment training standards and for increased efforts to reach out to local journalists affected by sexual assault.

Filmed during the 2014 siege of Gaza, which left 507 children dead and 3,598 wounded, Born in Gaza follows a group of young children growing up in a war zone. The film examines the widespread psychological trauma experienced by adolescents coping with injury, fear, and the loss of loved ones. It is estimated that 400,000 children in Gaza are in desperate need of psychological support.

Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, six year old Bisan finds it increasingly difficult to communicate. ‘She does not talk to us about what happened’ says one of her friends. ‘If anyone asks, she gets mad’.

Through observational footage and interviews Hernan Zin provides, with sensitivity, individual stories that go far beyond news coverage of the events and offer children the opportunity to be heard. In doing so, he also provides space for dialogue and healing. ‘The situation is really complicated. We have a war every two years’, states 13 year old Mohamed. ‘I often think about our situation and I never see the end’.

Directed by Hernan Zin
Produced by La Claqueta & Contramedia Films
Duration: 74′
Year: 2014

Jo Metson Scott spent the past five years photographing American and British soldiers who spoke out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Using their letters and portraits, her book The Grey Line explores the soldiers’ reasons for doing so, and the fates that have awaited them.

Metson Scott introduced The Grey Line to a Frontline Club audience on Tuesday night, with journalist Victoria Brittain and former SAS soldier Ben Griffin joining her on stage.

Metson Scott described the proces of collating her book:

“The Project is about individuals, or soldiers, who have moral doubts about their involvement in the Iraq War, and over a period of five years I went back and forth to America and I interviewed about 40 soldiers. . . . I essentially was looking at what an individual does when they’re contractually obliged to do something that they’re morally opposed to.”

 

“The thread that runs through them all,” Griffin said of Metson Scott’s subjects, “is a moral objection to what’s going on – seeing a moral bankruptcy in what is being done in these countries.”

Griffin himself fought in Iraq in 2004:

“We would go out in the nighttime and use explosives to smash our way into people’s homes. . . . These were normal civilians . . . I suppose it could all be summed up when my commanding officer . . . said that he was worried that we were becoming the secret police of Baghdad. . . . I contemplated this every day. What was I doing? What was I doing taking part in this?”

In 2005, he refused to return and was discharged. He began criticising the Iraq War in public, and in 2008, a High Court injunction banned him from ever speaking again on what he knew from his time in the service.

Griffin adhered to the injunction for two and a half years.

“I actually became quite ill,” he remembered, “in a sort of PTSD kind of way. Got very depressed, and I was drinking a lot, and I was thinking about Iraq, and the rest of it. And I decided that maybe what was causing the illness to be worse was that I had this duty to speak.”

In 2011, he founded the UK Chapter of Veterans for Peace.

Griffin praised Metson Scott for capturing the courage in her subjects:

“The most important point to make about this resistance is that of all the guys I’ve met . . . this is not about being scared [of getting hurt].

 

“This is about being morally opposed to doing it to other people . . . to shooting people . . . to killing people, to torturing people, to dragging them out of their houses in the middle of the night.

 

“[Yet] the media likes to portray these [soldiers] as cowards.”

At its core, Griffin tied the problem to Empire – “Britain and America are basically an Empire,” he said – and that the projection of power – “the war in Iraq I think is pretty straightforward: it’s about controlling the oil supply” – has lacked a real moral footing.

Audience member Anwar Sarwar, also a British veteran of the Iraq War, agreed:

“I’ve been to Auschwitz and Birkenau . . . it was absolutely horrific. . . . This is a wider case about whether you should fight for Queen and Country, etc. When something like that happens, you’ll feel it in your stomach. And I’m sure that loads of people here are willing to get up and fight that kind of tyranny.

 

“That’s not the kind of thing that was going on in Iraq, where I served twice, and I was also one of the first troops to invade. . . . I was the guy kicking the doors in.”

Charles Glass is a veteran broadcaster, journalist and writer. His latest book Deserter explores the widely untold stories of the British and American deserters in the Second World War. He follows a group of soldiers into the heat of battle and explores what motivated them to take their fateful decision to run away.

Jake Wood is a former soldier who worked in parallel as a business analyst. In Among You he tells the story of his time serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the battle he faced upon his return when diagnosed with chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Through his own experiences he examines the harsh reality of front-line combat, the courage of the troops and the devastating after-effects of service that some suffer.

They will be joining us in conversation, chaired by Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith, to talk about their respective works and the comparisons in the trauma suffered by soldiers from World War Two to Afghanistan.

In 1970, English documentarian Michael Grigsby released I Was a Soldier, which explored life after war for three young men returning from Vietnam to their homes in the heartland of Texas.

Grigsby went back to Texas last year, rekindling his friendships with these men and their families, and telling their updated story in We Went To War.

After a screening at the Frontline Club on September 17, Grigsby and co-director Rebekah Tolley answered questions from the audience. They elaborated a philosophy of film that seemed, at its very core, to be about feeling, healing, and connecting – processes that veterans, weighed down by trauma and loneliness, can find as rare as they are vital.

Tolley and Grigsby were asked how they had captured such authenticity in their subjects.

"It’s a word called trust," Grigsby answered.  "Very simple."  

When making We Went to War, he and Tolley spent the first few days with their subjects discussing directions the film might take, but the next three weeks without a camera, simply spending time together.  In the end, Grigsby reflected:

"We gave the [subjects] the space to be themselves … That’s a crucial thing in the way I like to make pictures: let people be what they are, and don’t let’s try to have an agenda in which we try to force the pace."

 Yet once filming began, they shot We Went to War in only 11 days.  

"I like to shoot fast, actually," Grigsby said.  "The main reason is … if you’re invading some people’s life, you want to give them the minimum hassle."

Meditative in style, We Went to War’s scenes often contain little more than shots of Texas’ beautiful rustic landscape, set to a mournful guitar.  Grigsby explained:

"When you hear some very powerful dialogue, I want time to absorb it, actually. I don’t want to be pushed on to the next scene, and the next scene.  And one of the ways we’ve done that, I think, is just cutting to a landscape … and you can just resonate, and think, about things … just to give us, the audience, time to think, to feel, to listen.  And I feel very deeply this is something sadly missing now … that time, the space, to think, to feel."  

Another reason to highlight space, Grigsby said:

"Was to emphasize all that loneliness.  I feel, in the world, we’re like figures in a landscape.  We rarely communicate and rarely touch one another."

"In a sense, I don’t think we [as documentary makers] have a mission to explain.  We have a mission to feel."

Both I Was a Soldier and We Went to War have drawn rave reviews, particularly from veterans. Grigsby shared:

"We heard of one veteran who saw the film … and we’re told that he went home and apologized to his lady of 40 years, that he hadn’t been able to understand what she was going through.  And for the first time in 40 years, it seems that they are now having a dialogue.  And that’s incredible.  It’s just incredible to ask that one film can actually just open the eyes and the heart a little bit and enable this thing to happen.  That’s, that’s beautiful."

We Went to War has not been officially released yet, but the trailer and future screening dates can be found on this website

By Nicky Armstrong

Half way through the film the ripple effect that war has on journalists and the stresses that leak out from being present at such horrific moments in people’s lives are laid bare for the audience to see. The question of morals, as well as dealing with your own problems and family life back home seem to be put to the back of the reporters minds; the job in hand is their only real focus at the time. But these problems cannot be ignored, and the psychological cost of covering a war really becomes apparent.

PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) is a repetitive premise throughout the film. The reality of dealing with war once you are out of combat is a different task all together. When producer Anthony Feinstein was asked if every journalist suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder his answer was no, but the reality is that journalists, and indeed soldiers have a much higher risk of suffering from PTSD than the average person – the way each individual journalist deals with the trauma is different. It was made clear by the journalists in the film that they seek no sympathy for their troubles, after all these are their decisions, but this does not stop the overwhelming feeling of guilt that comes with the job. As mothers and fathers, with families back home, it is hard to withhold emotion when witnessing events where they are faced with the dilemma of ‘report or help’.

The film shows that a recurring side effect from reporting is that most of the journalists seem to suffer from nightmares, “it is not a normal nightmare, it is impounding and insisting,” and many use drink to block out the memories. It seems that journalists learn to cope with these intrusive thoughts, but not all are successful. 

Why do you do it? Was the key question asked of Finbarr O’Reilly, a Reuters reporter featured in the film and present at last night’s screening; “I don’t enjoy being scared” he stated, and certainly the loss of friends such as Tim Hetherington has shifted his focus and left him questioning his future. But the truth is these pictures need to be taken, and as one reporter said in the film “you will never feel as alive as when you are staring death in the face.”

It seems that news agencies are finally recognizing the stresses of reporting in combat and that PTSD is a very real phenomenon among combat journalists that is starting to lose its stigma and is being accepted as reality. The nature of war reporting has changed over the years, journalists put themselves in highly volatile environments and many pay for it with their mental health and in some cases even their lives. Under Fire: Journalists In Combat is a film that addresses these issues.

That’s why Anthony Feinstein has done our business a favour. This book is the result of the first exercise of its kind. It is the first time the question has been subjected to scientific scrutiny. It is dispassionate, detached, cautious in the conclusions it draws – and all the more powerful for that. 

Feinstein took two groups of journalists. The first consisted of more than a hundred who make their living solely, or predominantly, in conflict zones. The second – a control group – consisted of journalists who never go to war.

He distributed lengthy and detailed questionnaires and was surprised to find that a high proportion of the first group were interested enough – and happy – to participate. The conclusions he draws are not anecdotal (though they are illustrated with powerful anecdotal testimony) but statistical.

Read the book and they stare you in the face: those of us who have spent our lives surrounded by people who are killing other people are significantly more likely to be alcohol or drug abusers, less likely to have a happy marriage or a stable family, more given to anxiety, depression, and nightmares, and, tellingly, extremely inclined to ignore all of the above. 

The good news is that there is nothing inevitable (or even likely) about the condition known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), for Feinstein finds that a clear and indisputable majority of those in the first group never develop any symptoms. They cope.

The intriguing thing is you can’t tell who will be affected and who will not, or what will trigger the condition in any given individual. Feinstein believes that once the condition takes hold, it doesn’t go away unless treated. Here he is on less safe scientific territory.

There are others who have long ago accepted the existence of the condition but who believe that formal treatment is not always and automatically the best course of action.

PTSD, the pioneer in the field, Dr Gordon Turnbull, says, is not a mental illness in the conventional sense. Mental illness is an abnormal response to normal circumstances. PTSD is a normal response (in some people) to abnormal circumstances. Some psychiatrists take the view that the treatments that are now on offer simply pathologies a non-pathological condition. 

The child psychiatrist Lynne Jones has worked for years with traumatised children in emergency situations. I first encountered her in the Balkans; more recently she has been in Northern Uganda. She cites a recent study of Lebanese people traumatised by prolonged exposure (over years) to civil war.

Over a 10 year period, in the vast majority of cases, symptoms simply disappeared. Time really was the healer. Feinstein disputes that this would automatically apply to journalists whose lives are not comparable, in every sense, to people who witness (or take part in) the destruction of their own societies.

Like professional soldiers, journalists tend to fly into other peoples’ war zones and fly out again and then try to fit in to a normal family and social context among people with no experience of war. It’s different. And it merits study. Where do I stand now? I stand for taking this seriously.

There is much still to be done. Feinstein’s study is limited to journalists from the developed world – those of us who swan in and out of other people’s war zones. What about the people on whom we depend, the editors and reporters, the investigative journalists who devote their lives to uncovering corruption, crime, and the abuse of power in their own homelands? What is it like to go home to your Moscow apartment knowing that maybe – just maybe – you might, tonight, pay for your efforts to expose the truth with your life? This book will contribute to what is already a change in culture among journalists.

Five years ago, I doubt whether anyone was prepared to put their hand up and say, honestly, wait a minute, I think I’m having a rough time. Already some of the best in our business have drawn an explicit link between what they do for a living and their state of mind.

For my money Anthony Loyd is one of the best reporters of our day. We owe him a lot. And I hope he won’t mind me saying that one of the many things for which we owe him is his remarkable book “My War Gone By I Miss it So”.

If you’re still sceptical about Feinstein’s field of enquiry, go back and read Anthony Loyd. And then look again at this dispassionate, careful marshalling of scientifically gathered evidence. I say it again. Feinstein has done us a favour. We should treat this book with the respect it deserves.

Journalists Under Fire:The Psychological Hazards of Covering War
Members’ price £14 (plus p&p) By Anthony Feinstein