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

To explore the emotional health of journalists covering the migrations of refugees across Europe.

Descriptive. A secure website was established and participants were given their unique identifying number and password to access the site.

Newsrooms and in the field.

Responses were received from 80 (70.2%) of 114 journalists from nine news organisations.

Symptoms of PTSD (Impact of Events Scale-revised), depression (Beck Depression Inventory-Revised) and moral injury (Moral Injury Events Scale-revised).

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.

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.