Mental health efforts become a globally connected movement

The mental health of journalists has been steadily deteriorating since the pandemic. Many people feel overwhelmed due to a broken business model and rapid digitalization, which adds to the emotional difficulty of the content we cover. Most newsrooms have become unhealthy places to work, with record levels of burnout, anxiety, depression, and post traumatic stress disorder.

The good news is that there are more organizations than ever before dedicated to wellbeing in the media. The veteran Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma and Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma have been joined by The Mind Field (2018), The Self-Investigation (which I co-founded in 2020) and the Headlines Network (2021). The American Press Institute includes resilience and wellness as one of its four focus areas, and organizations promoting media freedom and providing safety for journalists are strengthening their psychosocial support.

The mental health revolution in the media has started. However, shifting a structurally unhealthy culture takes more than the work of a few organizations and people — we need a concerted, globally connected movement. In 2024, there will be more direct support, prevention efforts, financial support, communities of practice and convenings, all in service of media professionals’ mental health. We will move from individual actions to networked and systemic ones.

• More direct support: With precarious salaries, very few journalists can afford paying for therapy. Next year we’ll see more newsrooms offering paid sessions via their employee assistance programs or mental health benefits and accompanying them with awareness actions to destigmatize their use. This is less likely to happen in local journalism and in the Global South, so external funding will be required for these communities.Other forms of support will come from helplines, such as the one launched in the end of 2023 by the German investigative journalism association Netzwerk Recherche. It’s “an independent, anonymous and free telephone consultation,” which has trained journalists at the other end of the line to support mentally stressed callers.
• More prevention efforts: Reactive interventions should be the last resort, and we’ll see organizations taking more proactive actions. “Organization-wide early interventions…provide the highest ROI [return on investment], at £5.60 for every £1 invested,” according to Deloitte, as they help mitigate sick leaves and increase talent retention and acquisition.The World Health Organization sees mental health and work as inextricable. Media companies will incorporate more trainings on the topic, expanding their learning and development offerings beyond the typical hard skills, especially for managers. We will also see more specialized trainings for different types of beats with specific challenges, including fact-checking and climate emergency reporting.
• More financial support: As funders prioritize sustainability of their grantees’ work, they’ll recognize the importance of budget line items for wellbeing. This trend already started in the social impact sector, steered by a working group coordinated by The Wellbeing Project. My wish is that media funders will also incorporate mental health support organizations in their donation portfolios, so that our nonprofits can grow at the scale needed. A glimmer of hope comes from the recent backing to this topic from Ashoka, an global nonprofit organization that promotes social entrepreneurship. They named me a fellow this past November and will provide financing to The Self-Investigation for the next three years.
• More communities of practice: More communities of practice will appear, across languages and regions. Documenting and sharing newsrooms’ efforts to incorporate a sustained culture of care will become essential to advance as an industry. Case studies need to be global so they can inspire a diverse range of realities and backgrounds.In The Self-Investigation’s Comunidad de Agentes de Bienestar (Wellbeing Agents Community), we’ve been empowering a group of 60 journalists from 20 countries with the tools to amplify wellbeing practices in their communities. As an example, 33 members created shared spaces to talk about current mental health challenges, and involved 240 people in total. “We finished the talk with a deep and renewed sense of connection and purpose,” said Alba Mora Roca, executive producer at AJ+. “We left the call much stronger as a team.”
• More convenings: Most media conferences are now regularly incorporating mental health in their agendas, but there have been just a few forums solely focused on the topic (SRCCON Care in 2022, API Local News Summit: Mental Health and Sustainability in 2023). In 2024, more of these dedicated spaces will happen globally.

The connection of all these actions and people will accelerate the industry-wide change that we need. As Nobel Prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine said: “Small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.” In the era of artificial intelligence, we need to invest in human intelligence, community, and compassion and unite forces to make journalism mentally healthier.