By Marina Adami

Most of the climate journalists surveyed by Dr Anthony Feinstein and Jillian Mead reported that mental health isn’t taken seriously by their newsrooms and 16% said they had taken a break from their work for mental reasons. 

These are some of the most striking preliminary findings that Feinstein presented at a recent event hosted by our Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN). His presentation was followed by a panel discussion chaired by the Reuters Institute Director Mitali Mukherjee with Bloomberg Green managing editor Sharon Chen, Filipino climate journalist Jhesset O. Enano and OCJN associate director Diego Arguedas Ortiz.

The findings

Feinstein and Mead surveyed a sample of 268 journalists covering climate change from 90 countries on five continents. Here’s a taste of their findings: 

• 55% said they do not have access to resources supporting mental and physical health. 
• Around 30% of the sample were directly impacted by climate change, such as through the loss of a family member, friend or home. 
• Almost half of them reported moderate to severe symptoms of anxiety  (48%) and depression (42 %).
• Around one in five journalists (22%) reported prominent symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). “When you look at the lifetime prevalence for PTSD in a safe country like Canada, it's around 6%,” Feinstein said.

Despite these figures, 83% of the journalists surveyed feel there is a positive psychological aspect to their work, and around 73% believe their work is influencing the discussion on climate change.

Feinstein’s past work includes research on the impact of mental health on conflict reporting. He authored Journalists Under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War (Johns Hopkins University Press) and Shooting War. He also co authored this report on the emotional toll of reporting on the refugee crisis along with Hannah Storm. 

Watch the event

Four takeaways from the discussion

1. Climate journalists need more help to deal with the mental health impact of their work. Even a well-resourced newsroom like Bloomberg’s, with interest in climate reporting and generic mental health support, lacks protocols specific to climate reporting, Sharon Chen said: “With climate change, I guess the idea is that it's a bit more abstract, academic, sciencey, and people don't necessarily see it as necessary to invest in.”

“Media organisations are failing when they send us to cover climate change for years without providing support for it,” said our own Diego Arguedas Ortiz. “But this doesn't need to stay this way: it can change.” 

2. Newsrooms can take a few easy steps to address this issue. Feinstein stressed that some effective ways to counter negative impacts on climate journalists’ mental health are simple and inexpensive. “My experience is that a little therapy can go a long way. Sometimes you just need a few sessions to help a journalist,” he said. 

Offering such help might even save newsrooms money by avoiding longer leaves of absence due to unaddressed mental health symptoms, he explained. This could even take the shape of creating designated spaces for journalists to talk to each other and to editors about any struggles they’re experiencing, Arguedas Ortiz said.

Chen said that something that helps her journalists is exploring their own climate anxiety and turning it into reporting. “They feel more positive when they feel like their journalism is helping someone. And so the reporter who was feeling anxious and then shared that anxiety, and turned it into a dialogue with readers, can feel better herself because she's done something about it,” she explained.

3. It might be helpful to reframe some climate stories. Faced with frustration and a feeling that nobody is listening to climate news, some reporters might find audiences more receptive to stories that reframe climate issues to seem more applicable to their day-to-day life, Chen suggested. Some of her reporters have found it helpful to look at climate topics from the point of view of specific industries, for example. 

“It's easy for reporters to get sucked into the emotion of a climate change story, and the editors are the ones who need to pull back the lens and say, how do we get someone to care about this story?” she said. “We write about it from a risk management perspective, like this is how it's going to impact your home, business, land, insurance costs.” 

This is also a way to engage with younger audiences, Chen said, as the climate stories that resonate the most with this segment, in her experience, relate to careers and consumer habits. 

4. Journalists can take a few steps to safeguard their mental health. “You can't wait for the structure to change. You have to start yourself right now, with what you control,” Arguedas Ortiz said. This might mean spending more time with your family and friends, he suggested, and taking breaks. Another useful step for climate journalists is joining or creating a community of peers like our own climate network.

"Communities are a space of healing," Arguedas Ortiz said. “People come to us and say, ‘Look, I came for the science and the policy, but I stayed for the space and the peers.’”

This is backed up by data, Feinstein said: “If you've got good relationships and a supportive network, these are powerful protective factors. And that resonates with the broader mental health literature. If you step outside journalism, even with major mental illnesses like schizophrenia, if you've got good psychosocial support around, then you can have a better outcome.”

Enano warned against what she sees as a dangerous leaning towards exceptionalism among some journalists. “There's sometimes this ego that comes into play,” she said. “A lot of journalists and editors don't want to really admit it. But sometimes we have an idea of journalism as only for those who have the stomach for it.” This is harmful, she explained, because journalism is, fundamentally, only a job.

“We have empathy. We have empathy towards the people we report on because we care a lot about the issues, right? But sometimes we fail to extend that empathy to ourselves,” she said.