Journalists covering the refugee and migration crisis are affected by moral injury not PTSD

Abstract

Objective: To explore the emotional health of journalists covering the migrations of refugees across Europe. Design: Descriptive. A secure website was established and participants were given their unique identifying number and password to access the site. Setting: Newsrooms and in the field. Participants: Responses were received from 80 (70.2%) of 114 journalists from nine news organisations. Main outcome measures: Symptoms of PTSD (Impact of Events Scale-revised), depression (Beck Depression Inventory-Revised) and moral injury (Moral Injury Events Scale-revised). Results: Symptoms of PTSD were not prominent, but those pertaining to moral injury and guilt were. Moral injury was associated with being a parent (p = .031), working alone (p = .02), a recent increase in workload (p = .017), a belief that organisational support is lacking (p = .046) and poor control over resources needed to report the story (p = .027). A significant association was found between guilt and moral injury (p = .01) with guilt more likely to occur in journalists who reported covering the migrant story close to home (p = .011) and who divulged stepping outside their role as a journalist to assist migrants (p = .014). Effect sizes (d) ranged from .47 to .71. Conclusions: On one level, the relatively low scores on conventional psychometric measures of PTSD and depression are reassuring. However, our data confirm that moral injury is a different construct from DSM-defined trauma response syndromes, one that potentially comes with its own set of long-term maladaptive behaviours and adjustment problems.