Telling stories of tragedy wears down the reporter as well as the victim, but as a Dart Ochberg Fellow, Melissa Sweet has recharged her belief that good journalism matters.

When my book about the life and death of murdered psychiatrist Dr Margaret Tobin was published last year, I could hardly bring myself to look at it. This was more than my usual journalistic paranoia about discovering errors, omissions or sloppy writing. I couldn’t bear to look at the book because it was a reminder of so many traumas.

The most obvious of these is that Inside Madness is about a murder and its impact – not a pleasant subject for a long-term relationship. Indeed, it’s the longevity of the relationships that you develop when researching a book that is both a blessing and a curse. Because you can spend so much time getting to know your subject, you hope to do a better job of researching and writing your story.

But you also become much more emotionally involved. In some senses, this is necessary and helpful. No-one in their right mind would volunteer the effort and time that a book devours without some sort of emotional stake. And anyone who writes a book to make their fortune is either a fool or JK Rowling.

Emotional engagement exacts costs, both personal and professional. Boundaries are inevitably transgressed. You come to know people so well that they are more than professional contacts, more than sources for your book. You are more aware than usual of the potential for your work to be hurtful.

So often in journalism, you mine someone’s story, package it up for retail, and then move onto the next subject, often in blissful ignorance of its impact on the lives of those involved. With a book, it can be more difficult to remain oblivious and to move on.

After many years of covering health and medical issues, I’ve come to the conclusion that patients rarely give true “informed consent” to have a medical procedure or intervention. Until they know what the surgeon’s blade or the physician’s pill means for them, they cannot fully appreciate the implications of their consent. The effects of medical interventions can be helpful and/or harmful, uncertain and can change with time.

So too the publication of a book has a range of unpredictable effects for those involved. When you write a book like Inside Madness, revealing intimate details about people and families, you have to accept the uncomfortable reality that you may be adding to the grief and trauma of those who have already suffered huge losses.

When you spend months investigating someone’s life and work, as I did with Dr Tobin, many difficult questions arise. What is relevant, what is true, which memories are reliable and which are not? Am I being fair, too tough, not tough enough? What are the rights of the dead and the unrepresented? (Dr Tobin was obviously unable to give her perspectives and the family of the murderer, Eric Gassy, chose not to be interviewed).

It’s a telling irony that the more time you have to research a topic, the more aware you become of the difficulties of ever knowing or reporting the “truth”. The deeper you delve, the more evident are the limitations of your trade. It can be hard enough to establish the facts of a situation given the utter unreliability of memory. Interpretations of peoples’ characters and motives is a minefield.

And it’s difficult to examine other people’s lives in detail without also examining your own. As I learnt more about Dr Tobin’s complex and contradictory character – she once declared, for example, not to have a sentimental bone in her body, yet I learnt of many sentimental gestures – I also reflected on my own contradictions and quirks, and wondered whether it’s possible to try to know someone else if you don’t know something of yourself and your own biases.

Inside Madness is more than the story of a gutsy woman and a terrible tragedy. It also examines our society’s inability to provide decent care and support to those with mental illness. The book was part of my response to the death of my brother Jeff, who killed himself the year before Dr Tobin was murdered. Writing the book was part of my own search for understanding about my brother’s life and death, and it was often a painful therapy.

All of us are marked in some way by the work that we do. When researching the book I spent some months attending the trial of Eric Gassy, the deregistered psychiatrist who was eventually found guilty of murdering his former boss. During that time, a number of reporters told me of how their work in courts had adversely affected their own psychological wellbeing. Some had spent many weeks listening to the grisly details of the Snowtown murders, and this had left a profound mark.

Bells rang when I saw an advertisement in The Walkley Magazine last year, calling for applications for the 2006 Dart Ochberg Fellowship. Established by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) and the Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, the fellowship brings together a small group of journalists, mainly from the US, to discuss and learn about issues related to the coverage of violence and trauma, whether wars, disasters, crimes, illness or accidents.

Within hours of learning I had won the fellowship, the previous Australian recipient, ABC journalist Philip Williams, rang me to say it was one of the best things he’d ever done as a journalist.

When I packed my bags to attend the fellowship in Hollywood last October, it was the emotional baggage which weighed heaviest. I was not only carrying a load from my book, but also despair at our industry’s direction – specifically the rise of celebrity and lifestyle journalism at the expense of investigative and humanitarian journalism, the boring predictability of so much coverage and commentary, the triumph of style over substance, the commercialisation of news values… the list goes on.

Tinseltown is the last place where I would have expected to rediscover an enthusiasm for journalism. But that was the fellowship’s great gift, for me anyway. It brought together seven journalists from the US, one from Colombia, one from Germany and one from Australia, and supported us to discuss our own work and issues, and to hear from experts about the impact of violence and trauma on communities and individuals, as well as on the journalists who cover it.

I must admit to approaching the fellowship with some scepticism after years of seeing various interest groups try to influence reporting on their particular pet subjects. Eventually, however, I was won over by the integrity of the Dart approach and came to realise that the goal was not to promote the ISTSS so much as to provide genuine help to journalists and journalism.

Hearing about the work of the other fellows (who included photographers, editors and television producers) reinvigorated my appreciation for what good journalism can achieve, often in the face of considerable resistance from the newsroom.

I was inspired by the news editor from Lafayette who pushed her small newspaper to cover the plight of prisoners in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It was hard to imagine an Australian newspaper having the guts and compassion to cover such an unpopular subject as prisoner welfare, not only in such depth but also in a way which humanised prisoners.

And all of us were gobsmacked by the courage of the young journalist from Colombia whose reporting on paramilitary crimes had led to death threats, forcing her to leave her home and country.

It was moving to hear seasoned war reporters talk about their work and its impact, including their struggles with problems such as post-traumatic stress disorder. It was a privilege to be amongst colleagues who were courageous enough to speak of their fears and frailties. It felt a million miles from the bravado and back stabbing which is so prevalent in many newsrooms and so often impedes professional discussion.

As a freelancer used to working in isolation, I also valued a deadline-free opportunity for stimulating interaction with the diverse characters involved in Dart, including Professor Frank Ochberg, a senior psychiatrist with a long interest in journalism and the impact of violence and trauma, who helped establish the Dart Centre; and Bruce Shapiro, the Centre’s executive director, a journalist and academic who has written about his own experiences as the victim of a random stabbing (and is also a regular guest of Phillip Adams on Radio National).

Also working with Dart are Mark Brayne, a former BBC foreign correspondent who retrained as a psychotherapist and now runs Dart in Europe, and Cait McMahon, its Australasian director, a psychologist who previously worked as a counsellor at The Age.

A week in Hollywood was just the therapy I needed, not only for dealing with the aftermath of Inside Madness but also for recharging a belief that good journalism matters.

Melissa Sweet is a freelance journalist who specialises in covering health and medical issues, and the author of Inside Madness (Macmillan Australia, RRP $35); www.sweetcommunication.com.au.

…thanks to the styrofoam cup

The Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma, based at the University of Washington in Seattle, is named for the family whose philanthropy has supported its work over the past decade. Many journalists who benefit are tickled to discover they owe a debt to the humble styrofoam cup, whose invention contributed to the Dart family’s wealth, estimated at more than US$3billion.

The Centre has developed resources to help journalists do a better job of covering violence and trauma, and works to improve journalists’ education and training in the area. It’s established awards and fellowships, and is developing an international network of journalists.
The Australasian branch of Dart is based in Melbourne, and has run training sessions for journalists from Australia, Indonesia and East Timor since its 2004 launch. Its director, Cait McMahon, says it’s helping to overcome the journalistic taboo against discussing professional traumas: “In tough cultures you don’t show weakness, and to have any sort of psychological or emotional reaction is often misunderstood as a weakness when it’s not. It’s purely about being human.”

McMahon says Dart is not promoting soft journalism; it’s about telling tough stories in a better way, which will resonate more with audiences. Ideas for its future directions in Australasia will be developed at a meeting in March of journalists and photographers interested in the Dart philosophy.

For more information go to www.dartCentre.org.