Mental Health and Wellbeing for Journalists: A Practical Guide

This book offers a first-of-its-kind, practical and person-centred guide to managing and contextualising journalists’ emotional wellbeing and mental health.

Drawing on the author’s experience as a storyteller, journalist and media safety consultant, the book combines significant lived personal experience with reflections from an international network of journalists and mental health experts to collate industry good practice and guidance. It takes readers through a history of mental health discussions in the industry, moving from a focus on war correspondents and post-traumatic stress disorder to considerations of vicarious trauma, moral injury and the impact of online harm on journalists. It shows how pressures already faced by those in the sector have been exacerbated by the global pandemic, giving rise to the prospect of a mental health crisis in the media if these issues remain unaddressed. As a counter to this concern, Storm shares insights from experts on what leaders can do to create safer workplaces and processes, how they can channel the empathy that is core to healthy journalism to promote the health of its people, and how they should consider mental health as intersecting with other issues such as physical safety, diversity and inclusion. Insights from science shed light on resilience levels, how our brains and bodies respond to trauma, and strategies that can be adopted to help us recover from challenging experiences. While acknowledging that some news organisations are starting to take note, Storm shows how others need to do more, offering ways in which newsrooms can learn from the lessons of recent years to bring about long-lasting change.

Mental Health and Wellbeing for Journalists is written for news media professionals, educators, and students, as well as anyone interested in promoting more sustainable journalism through supporting the industry’s most precious resource: its people.

Hannah Storm is a media consultant, specialising in journalism safety, mental health and leadership. She is the Founder and Co-Director of Headlines Network, a community to improve mental health conversations in the news media. She is the former CEO and Director of the Ethical Journalism Network and served as Director of the International News Safety Institute. She began her career at Reuters, and has spent more than two decades working internationally across diverse forms of media, including broadcast, print and digital.