Silence in the newsroom – journalist’s mental health from the risk communication approach

Abstract

Since the 1990s, South African psychiatrist Anthony Feinstein has addressed the issue of the mental health of journalists covering humanitarian tragedies, focusing on Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and moral injury, defined as a wound in the soul. In 2020, the first year of the covid-19 pandemic, the article “The covid reporters are not okay. Extremely not okay”, by young journalist Olivia Messer, working online, drew attention not only to the issue of reporters’ mental health, but also to the invisibility of the issue. This article aims to investigate how risk communication can contribute to uncover and address the risks to the mental health of journalists in Brazil, especially in the context of hybrid newsrooms and the platformization of journalism, one of the fields that make up the theoretical framework in its intersection with risk communication and psychiatry. The methodology includes bibliographic research in these three areas, platformization of journalism, risk communication and psychiatry, from the connection between them, and content analysis, of quantitative basis, of the coverage of the subject by Folha de S.Paulo and O Globo newspapers. The results point to the urgency of removing this issue of media and social invisibility and recognising the potential of risk communication to face it.