Special Issue Editorial: Mental Health in the Headlines

1. Background

News reporters are trained to run toward danger. They enter communities after tragedy. They interview people on the worst days of their lives. Researchers contend that during their careers “almost every journalist will cover stories considered to be traumatic” (Hill et al., 2020, p. 64). Journalists are near-constant witnesses to numerous potentially traumatic experiences (PTEs), including traffic accidents, natural disasters, fires, murders, robberies, violent assaults, torture/kidnapping, sexual assaults, child abuse, domestic violence, riots, war, mass casualty events, injury, illness, and death (MacDonald et al., 2017). They are expected to transform those experiences into accurate, ethical, and timely accounts for the public. Increasingly, journalists report these stories while navigating hostility and harassment (K. C. Miller, 2023a), only to repeat the cycle for their next assignment.

What happens to the journalist after the story is published? This emerging research question sits at the heart of this Special Issue, Mental Health in the Headlines. For all that journalism asks of its practitioners, the intersection of journalism and mental health has too often remained at the margins of scholarly inquiry and industry practice. While the “emotional turn” in journalism research (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020) is recognized as an emerging area of inquiry, more intersectional work needs to be done on the affective experiences of reporters with diverse identities reporting in both Western and global contexts. In addition, the field has developed sophisticated ethical traditions concerning journalists’ obligations to sources, subjects, audiences, and democratic society. Far less attention has historically been devoted to what the journalism industry owes newsroom staff, content creators, and freelancers employed more precariously.

The myth of the journalist as a detached observer can obscure a basic human reality: witnessing suffering does not leave the journalist unscathed. The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma—formerly housed at Columbia Journalism School and now independently operating as the Global Center for Journalism and Trauma—estimates that up to 59% of journalists exhibit PTSD symptoms (N. S. Miller, 2021, para. 6). Substance abuse and other maladaptive coping behaviors linked to PTEs are well documented among news professionals (MacDonald et al., 2016). The expectation that journalists remain professionally composed does not mean that they are psychologically unaffected. Indeed, one of the tensions running throughout this Special Issue is the distance between what journalists are professionally expected to withstand and what human beings can reasonably be expected to endure without consequence.

Mental health, therefore, cannot be separated neatly from the conditions under which journalism is produced. It is bound up with newsroom culture, employment security, professional identity, technology, gender, race and ethnicity, political power, organizational support, physical safety, and the ethical demands of witnessing and representing the suffering of others.

Burnout and exhaustion are threats to the role of journalism as The Fourth Estate (Haskell, 2026; K. C. Miller, 2023b). When journalists are afraid to pursue a story, emotionally depleted by sustained harassment, unsupported after traumatic assignments, or forced to choose between their psychological safety and professional expectations, the consequences extend beyond the individual journalist. They can shape what gets covered, who is willing or able to remain in the profession, whose voices are represented, and ultimately what the public is able to know. It is no hyperbole to say that journalists’ mental health is paramount to the functioning of democracy.

2. Scholarly Contributions

The title of this Special Issue of Journalism and Media is Mental Health in the Headlines. This title intentionally captures contrasting elements of human psychology in journalism. Mental health appears in the headlines when journalists report on suicide, trauma, psychiatric medication, violence, grief, and well-being. But mental health also exists behind the headlines, in the lives of the reporters, editors, photographers, producers, fixers, and student journalists responsible for producing them. Journalism does not simply represent mental health; it is produced by human beings whose own mental health is shaped by the conditions of their work.

When we first proposed this Special Issue, we sought out scholarship addressing four interconnected dimensions of the relationship between journalists and wellbeing: the systemic conditions influencing journalists’ mental health; journalists’ experiences covering difficult or traumatic subjects; media representations of mental health; and the effects of mental health storytelling on audiences and communities. We were particularly interested in scholarship that could move beyond the assumption that psychological distress is an individual problem requiring an individual solution—indeed, we were interested in systems-level questions and systems-level solutions. The sixteen articles ultimately collected here reinforce the urgency of that concern.

Across dramatically different journalistic environments, a recurring pattern emerged in the research: psychological harm is often experienced individually even when its causes are structural. Journalists develop coping mechanisms, establish boundaries, seek support from colleagues, disconnect from technology, compartmentalize emotions, and find ways to continue working. Such strategies can be meaningful and necessary. But resilience should not become a convenient way for institutions to transfer responsibility for harmful working conditions onto the people required to endure them.

This distinction is particularly important, now more than ever, because the risk of mental illness is not distributed equally among journalism practitioners. The studies in this collection foreground experiences of journalists not commonly represented in academic research.

3. A Global Approach to Journalists’ Mental Health

This Special Issue uniquely emphasizes mental health in global communication contexts. Trifinova and Jenkins’s study of the Russian–Ukrainian war, “‘Sometimes It’s Easier Just Not to Feel Anything’: How Ukrainian Women Fixers Respond to the Embodied Work of War Reporting,” emphasized that women journalists face compounded stressors, including sexual harassment and gender inequality, while reporting on the Russian–Ukrainian war. Canga’s study, “Stretched Under Job-Related Stress—How Do Albanian Journalists Negotiate Their Workplace Challenges?,” emphasized the stress of political interference and financial precarity on reporting in Southern Europe.

Turning toward the Arab World, Ullah and Jan explored journalists’ experiences working in a sensationalist, ratings-driven market in “The Emotional Toll of Conflict Reporting: Institutional, Cultural, and Audience Pressures in Pakistani Journalism.” Contributing to the now-growing body of literature examining the affective experiences of Palestinian journalists covering the war in Gaza, Abed used muted group theory to illuminate self-censorship, avoidance, increased visibility, and confrontational tactics as coping strategies among Palestinian-American reporters in “A Qualitative Study of the Experiences of Palestinian Journalists in the United States During the Ongoing Gaza Genocide.”

Authors from the African continent offered case examples of reporters’ experiences covering the COVID pandemic and training journalists on PTSD awareness. In “Female Journalists in Zambia and the Trauma and Toll of Reporting During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Mambwe and Kalungwana found that family support, faith and spirituality, and performances of strength were important coping mechanisms for Zambian women reporters during the global public health crisis. In “The Role of Ghanaian Media Organisations in Fostering Resilience Against PTSD: The Case of Multimedia Group Limited,” Appiah-Adjei emphasizes the need for better institutional mental health support services in Global South newsrooms, not just ad hoc resources.

4. Expanding Definitions of Potentially Traumatic Events

The studies gathered here also broaden our understanding of what constitutes a mental health risk in journalistic work. While Mohammed demonstrates through “A Systematic Review of the Literature on the Mental Health of Journalists Reporting on War, Conflict and Terrorism: Gaps and Recommendations for Future Studies” that conflict correspondents report elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and PTSD across numerous studies, adverse mental health consequences are not limited to frontline reporters. PTE exposure happens in contexts that far surpass arriving at the scene of a tragedy. Exposure can arrive through a phone screen in the form of sustained online harassment, as Grundy, Newman, and Slaughter, “Journalists’ Experiences of Online Harassment: Anxiety, Depression, and Posttraumatic Stress”, explores. Trauma can emerge through relentless technological change in already accelerated workplaces, as Hays conceptualizes technostress in “Technostress Is the (Re)new(ed) Normal: How Journalists Manage Technological Innovation.”

PTEs can accumulate through economic insecurity, political intimidation, discrimination, newsroom pressures, or repeated exposure to the suffering of sources and communities. Journalists’ reactions to covering self-harm incidents have received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature. Journalists are asked to do significant emotional labor as they report on suicide, as Korbiel describes in “Mental Health Risks for Journalists Covering Suicide in Times of Crisis.” And we see trauma accumulate in student journalists covering the deaths of their own peers, as Jost and Mesmer (2026) demonstrate in “Covering Student Death by Suicide: A Case Study on College Student Newspapers Navigating the News and Its Aftermath.” College journalism students across the United States report receiving little, if any, trauma-informed newsroom training before being asked to cover such traumatic events.

Today’s polarized political climate creates additional pressures for reporters—especially in the United States, where trust in news continues to erode (Brenan, 2025). Being labeled an “enemy of the people” by a sitting president can also leave journalists feeling stigmatized and belittled, as Thornton explores in “Duck and Cover: Journalists on Being ‘Enemies of the People’ During Early Days of Trump’s ‘Fake News’ World.” The rhetorical assault on the news profession may be felt acutely among reporters from underrepresented communities. In her study “‘Don’t Risk Your Life’: How BIPOC Journalists Navigate Identity, Newsroom Routines, and Safety in U.S. Broadcast News,” Vera-Phillips concludes that attention to identity and power within newsroom routines is essential for supporting journalists of color in the U.S. broadcast industry.

5. Toward Resilience and Wellbeing

Occupational mental health, in other words, cannot be reduced to acute or extraordinary experiences of trauma. It is also shaped by the ordinary routines, relationships, expectations, and structures through which contemporary journalism is practiced.

Nor can the intersection of journalism and mental health be understood solely by examining journalists themselves. Journalism helps construct the cultural language through which societies understand mental health and mental illness. Words, frames, metaphors, jokes, sources, and editorial decisions can reproduce stigma or challenge it, as Walker and Amendola explore in “‘Somebody Get Me Some Prozac!’: Trivializing Language and the Stigma of Drug Brand Names.” The responsibility to report on mental health carefully therefore exists alongside another responsibility that has received far less attention: attending to the mental health of those doing the reporting.

Perhaps most importantly, the scholarship assembled herein challenges an enduring professional impulse to equate endurance with strength. Journalists unquestionably demonstrate extraordinary resilience. Hill, Holton, and Belair-Gagnon remind us that resilience should not be strictly personal; the authors reconceptualize resilience as a relational and cross-institutional capacity. Celebrating individual resilience without interrogating why so much resilience is required risks romanticizing conditions that should instead be changed. A journalist’s capacity to continue working after harassment, trauma, discrimination, or loss does not make those conditions acceptable. Nor should seeking help be understood as evidence that a journalist is insufficiently suited to the profession. The question, then, is not simply how we can make journalists more resilient. It is how we can make journalism more humane.

That shift in emphasis—from repairing individuals to examining the environments in which they work—is one of the clearest threads connecting the contributions to this Special Issue. Individual strategies matter. Peer networks, mentorship, training, coping practices, and digital boundaries can provide meaningful support. But coping alone is insufficient. Institutional policies, ethical editorial leadership, psychological safety, professional autonomy, equitable newsroom cultures, trauma-informed practices, and systems that anticipate harm rather than responding only after it occurs are equally essential. The conceptual and systematic contributions in this collection further encourage us to understand journalists’ emotional well-being and resilience not merely as individual capacities, but as structural, relational, organizational, and ethical responsibilities.

The sixteen articles in Mental Health in the Headlines consequently ask us to look both at journalism and at the people who make journalism possible. Collectively, they encourage readers to think critically about stigma, not just in coverage of mental illness, but in the newsroom itself. The studies herein have diverse methods and contexts, but their collective message is difficult to ignore: mental health is not ancillary to journalism. It is part of the infrastructure upon which journalism depends. Together, these contributions illuminate both the human costs of journalistic work and the changes necessary to better support those who perform it.

6. Directions for Industry

Taken together, these sixteen contributions make visible something journalism has too often overlooked. Behind every byline, broadcast, photograph, interview, and headline is a person. The professional obligation to witness does not erase the psychological consequences of witnessing. The responsibility to inform the public does not eliminate fear, grief, exhaustion, trauma, or vulnerability. And professionalism should never require pretending otherwise.

If journalism is to fulfill its obligations to the public, then the institutions of journalism must also consider their obligations to the people performing that work. This requires moving beyond interventions that begin only after a journalist is already struggling. It means designing newsrooms, professional norms, educational practices, and systems of support around the recognition that psychological safety is part of occupational safety. As shown in a systematic review by Susana Herrera Damas and José M. Valero-, “Emotional Well-Being in Journalists: Conceptualization, Experiences, and Strategies in the Literature (2010–2025),” “Protective factors include social support, editorial autonomy, professional experience, purpose-driven motivation, and practices like mindfulness or digital disconnection. Yet their impact is often limited by weak organizational infrastructures.” Protecting journalists means taking harassment seriously before it becomes unbearable, preparing reporters for trauma before traumatic assignments occur, treating requests for support as ordinary rather than exceptional, and recognizing that different journalists encounter different forms and degrees of risk.

The future of journalism depends not only on whether journalists can continue producing the news. It depends on whether they can continue doing so without being asked to sacrifice their well-being as proof of their commitment to the profession. Journalism asks people to bear witness to the world. But, who bears witness to what that witnessing does to them? Mental Health in the Headlines begins with the premise that we must.