Courting Trauma: An Unspoken Mental Health Crisis Among Journalists in East Africa

For journalists covering trauma, capturing horrific images is part of the job. Each assignment feeds into the next, creating a cycle of witnessing horror. The story begins with getting the visuals, talking to witnesses, recording evidence, packaging, and relaying to the audience. The story is not worthwhile without visuals. However, every traumatic image captured is seared in the journalist’s cerebral cortex. In this delicate space, the images live and become part of the journalist’s internal memory. A silent companion, a constant reminder of the horror the journalist has witnessed - signaling a courtship of sorts. Using narrativity and in-depth interviews as qualitative methods, the paper situates the problem of a mental health crisis among journalists in East Africa covering traumatic events. Through in-depth interviews, narratives of journalists from Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda indicate a courtship with trauma in the line of duty. The journalists are contextualized as visual rhetors – engaged in the production and dissemination of horrific or difficult visual content. Frost (2019) describes visual rhetors as journalists who witness and produce visual frames of the dark side. This form of media practice produces images of violent conflicts. Learning from Visual Rhetoric and Dual Representation theoretical frames, the paper examines a correlation between visual rhetors ’exposure to horrific images and trauma. Arguing that visual rhetors’ multiple exposure to traumatic images in the production process causes trauma. The escalation of trauma as a mental health issue among visual rhetors is seldom talked about, yet it poses a mounting crisis that demands intervention.