Breaking The Silence: The Journalist Trauma Blog: Chris Booth
The BBC’s Chris Booth in Baghdad, 2006
Following is a blog by Chris Booth, a former bureau chief for the BBC. I got to know Chris in Baghdad. Our offices were separated by a narrow road and concrete blast walls in the city’s Red Zone. A visit to the BBC house was as far as I might go for weeks at a time in 2007, it was that dangerous. Chris was a wonderful colleague and friend. We intermittently kept in touch even as we both tried to banish the memories of Iraq from our minds. Recently, we’ve spoken more regularly. It’s been lovely to renew our friendship.
After reading my memoir Line in the Sand, Chris wrote me an eloquent, heartfelt email. When she read it, my life partner Mary Binks, herself a former journo, said: “Chris needs to publish this”. Chris is not on social media (lucky guy) so I’m publishing it here and at the same time starting an occasional guest blog for journalists who want to share their stories through my FB and LinkedIn pages. As Chris said: “I feel absolutely no shame admitting to what I’ve been through. On the contrary. It’s only by being prepared to be open about the consequences of our careers in journalism that a) newcomers to the profession know what to expect, and b) newsroom managers might grasp how important their behaviour is to the wellbeing of staff who venture into the field or who sift UGC (user-generated content) all day long.
Well done, Chris.
By Chris Booth, West of England
I know exactly the moment I should have quit journalism. It wasn’t getting shot at and mortared while trying to escape from a shattered building. It wasn’t while I was routinely mistreated and wronged by a well-known senior correspondent. And it wasn’t one of those mornings when, exhausted, I would open my stuffed inbox to reveal yet another asinine communication from management about how ‘doing more with less’ was actually an ‘efficiency’ and ‘an exciting new opportunity’.
No. The moment came one morning in Moscow, mid-2000, half-way up the nondescript, dirty highway leading to Vnukovo airport. That was the morning I should have asked to stop the car, got out, turned round, and never looked back.
I had just joined the BBC from Associated Press TV, where as a producer I covered the wars in Chechnya and Kosovo, along with all the other human tumult and horror that makes up the menu of agency news reporting. I was with a correspondent and cameraman in one of the blue bureau Volvos, rushing to get on a flight to the south of the country. I forget exactly where, but probably Chechnya or bordering Chechnya, where there was always plenty of telegenic misery to be found.
Sitting on the back seat, I imagined what would confront us when we arrived: sticking lenses and microphones into people’s faces, asking them how they felt… Suddenly, I wanted to be sick, crap my pants, and punch someone – anyone – in the face. But I talked myself down: it’s going to be ok, it always works out, you’ll see.
What I was actually doing was ignoring flashing red lights on the dashboard of my central nervous system: at least two of the triad ‘fight, flight or freeze’ were kicking off. My body was trying its best to warn me that I was utterly spent. But that was news I didn’t want to hear. So, I put it out of mind, boarded the plane, and carried on for another ten years.
More than twenty later, and as little as two weeks ago, I wouldn’t have been able to write this blog. I might still have been in bed; or would have gone back to bed again by now; or would be falling out with my wife; or would have either been thinking about drinking; or would have already picked up. But today is one of a string of better days to follow eight months of severe illness.
This has been the latest in a series of major depressive episodes to sink me long after I stopped going to warzones. This time, the trigger was a profoundly first-world problem: moving house. A stressful period for most people, but relatively trivial in the scheme of things. A nice problem to have, you might say. My problem is that after years of exposure to traumatic events against insane deadlines, my nerves are a shambles. My amygdala – the primitive part of the brain that governs fight, flight and freeze – is a quivering, twitching wreck of a thing. Stuff that most people will easily push through can stop me in my tracks. For months.
This time round, everything was compounded by a very bad response to sertraline, an antidepressant. I was put on a high dose, and it played havoc. I could sleep a maximum of 90 minutes a night and during the day I couldn’t sit still. Then I got bruising all down my legs, learned it was a very bad sign, and came off the meds. I had all the side effects, swiftly followed by all the withdrawal symptoms.
But I believe I may have at last turned a corner. Simple things can still cause meltdown – busy supermarkets, for example, for some reason, leave me a shaking and tearful wreck. But my concentration is returning. And I’m not going to bed during the day. Practical markers show that there’s improvement. Chief among them, I am cooking meals and thinking about the next day’s menu again. Making food is something I normally enjoy immensely. When I was in the darkest places of the last eight months – in fact, for nearly all of the last eight months – chopping an onion took half a day’s mental preparation. Afterwards, I would have to take a break and probably shed some tears. Not onion-induced, but sheer wordless anxiety.
These days, I’m trying to take things in sequence rather than solve everything in parallel. All my life, I have been an over-achiever whose motto was ‘the show must go on’. I didn’t pay much, if any, attention to my feelings if they got in the way of the job at hand. Today, when I see a therapist, he flags up that I’m ‘intellectualising’ my responses rather than revealing what I feel. My answer tends to be that I have no idea what I feel. He says to sit with it. And after a few minutes, a volcano of anger erupts.
All this emotional lava is from years of unprocessed traumatic experiences. Years of getting off a plane, knackered, and almost immediately being called to get on another. Not enough time to think about the dead bodies, the weeping mothers, the fact that I nearly got killed myself on many, many occasions. That was my life. I should add that for a while, I loved it. A teenage ambition made technicolour real: war reporter! But the work was steadily and profoundly damaging me.
I was appointed bureau chief in Moscow, and later in Baghdad. I thought of myself as the ultimate cool-headed leader. In fact, that’s pretty much what I was: my annual appraisals had me down as grade A every time. We got the stories, and nobody got hurt on my watch: partly good fortune, but also because I was totally on it. Turns out, my body was storing everything up. At night now, in my dreams, I obsessively haunt the old theatres where the action played out – the battlefields, checkpoints, hotels, airports.
As for doing things in parallel/sequence: I wanted to get well, kick booze, re-start running and write a book, while earning decent freelance cash, all at the same time. And twenty years ago, I probably could have done it standing on my head. That part of me still exists: solve everything, keep everyone safe, keep my eyes open for the next threat coming down the road. But I’m trying, really trying, to give myself time. I’m not in a warzone anymore. I’m a husband and a father, not a bureau chief, and I want to do better by those who love me.
I take the days one by one. Revival comes first – ‘recovery’ is perhaps too strong a word. Noting the small changes, and being glad of them, can help create a geometric progression of healing. A bad day doesn’t mean catastrophe and back to square one. It’s just a bad day. Neurochemistry rarely changes in nice, smooth increments, however much I might hope it were otherwise. I’m starting to understand that.
The next step is abstinence. For one thing, alcohol severely affects my sleep now. A few drinks and I go out like a light, but I wake up three hours later as though I’ve had a whole pot of espresso. Then, shed the excess weight – depression’s gift - and try to make proper exercise part of the routine again. A year back, I ran a half-marathon. Now I get tired walking upstairs. I don’t need to be doing major athletics, but I miss the free endorphins on offer.
I still don’t really understand the concept of self-compassion, or how to practise it. My self-compassion has too often boiled down to allowing myself a drink or five. I had/have no other ‘off’ button. And I so desperately wanted to switch off. There were two modes: work damned hard, or have a drink. Sometimes combined. What would ‘chilling out’ constitute? To this day, I can’t say I know. Hopefully this too might be a so-called ‘learned behaviour’.
This morning I’m in the kitchen again, deliberately choosing a recipe that will take time: homemade pasta, plus a Bolognese sauce that can’t be rushed. It gets me out of my head, and into a physical process: you pay attention, because you really don’t want to burn the onion and garlic. I’m vaguely wondering about the cricket test match against Australia that gets underway tomorrow; and if the weather will hold for the game; and what my life would be like right now if two decades ago I had stepped out of that BBC Volvo, turned around, and walked away.
