SRINAGAR: Officials reported that a tourist from West Bengal died of a heart attack in a Srinagar hospital on Saturday morning.
The tourist, who was staying in a hotel in Srinagar with his family, had complained of chest pain. He was then taken to the SKIMS Hospital in Srinagar Soura, where doctors pronounced him dead.
The deceased has been identified as Suhash Chandra, an 80-year-old resident of Deshbandhu Nagar, West Bengal. (KS)
Heat waves in Summers. Cold waves in Winters. It’s quite normal and not much of a News, isn’t it?
Wait, climate experts have just found that in India the weather patterns are fast changing and we are suffering more heat waves in Summers and less cold waves in Winters in the past decade.
Now, this is not welcome news both for people and agriculture.
With summer already sizzling with heat and temperatures shooting up all over the country, the findings of the study carried out by the University of Hyderabad (UoH), attain significance. The research paper was published in the Journal of Earth Sciences System.
The study led by Aninda Bhattacharya of the Department of Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences has analysed data of daily (max & min) temperatures from 1970-2019. The idea was to investigate the trend in the frequency of occurrence of days with anomalously high temperatures (referred to as heat waves) and days with anomalously low temperature (referred to as cold waves) over different climatic regions of India.
Their conclusion was that heat waves have become more common in summer while cold waves have less so common in winter in the recent decade in India. Heat waves and cold waves have severe adverse impacts on agriculture, human health and industrial production, they said in their publication.
Human influence on the climate system is predominant and proven. Human-caused (anthropogenic) climate change has caused roughly one degrees Celsius increase in global average surface temperature since the pre-industrial era. Climate change has worsened the frequency, intensity, and impacts of some of the weather events such as heat waves and cold waves, the researchers from the UoH say.
The Indian scenario
India is broadly divided into four major climatic zones:
Montane (climate is harsher, with lower temperatures in mountainous regions)
Subtropical humid climate
Arid and semi-arid climate
Dry and wet tropical climate
Now, a heat wave is defined as the occurrence of anomalously higher temperatures for consecutive three days or more. The authors found that heat wave events are increasing at the rate of 0.6 events per decade.
New Delhi: Children bathe in a reservoir to get relief from the ongoing heatwave, during a hot summer day, on the banks of river Yamuna in New Delhi, Thursday, July 1, 2021. (PTI Photo/Ravi Choudhary)
Similarly, a cold wave is defined as the occurrence of anomalously lower temperatures for consecutive three days or more. The authors found that cold wave events are decreasing at the rate of 0.4 events per decade.
Their overall observations based on nearly 40 years of data points to days with anomalously higher temperatures increasing during summer every year while the days with anomalously lower temperatures are decreasing during winter every year.
The authors also deduced the opposite trends in heat waves and cold waves. For instance, heat waves are more common over the arid and semi-arid climatic region while cold waves are less so common over the same region.
To facilitate the complicated observational and analytical study, the researchers compared the current generation computer models used to predict future climate with India Meteorological Department (IMD) observations.
The Authors found that the models fail to capture the observed spatial features in the trend in the frequency of occurrence of heat waves and cold waves in toto over India. This underlines the need for a better process-level understanding of the factors governing these extreme events and their representations in the models over the Indian region.
This study was led by Aninda Bhattacharya, Dr. Abin Thomas, and Dr Vijay Kanawade from the Centre of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, School of Physics at the University of Hyderabad, in collaboration with Prof Chandan Sarangi from IIT Madras, Dr P. S. Roy from World Resources Institute (WRI) and Dr Vijay K. Soni from India Meteorological Department, Ministry of Earth Sciences, New Delhi.
The weather department has already forecast a severe month of April heat across most parts of the country. Other climate studies have also shown an increasing trend of cyclones (pre monsoon) period in the Arabian Sea, which is leading to an increase in temperatures and overall climate situation over the country in the last few years. They also linked it to unusually heavy rainfall episodes.
The IMD forecast for monsoon
Meanwhile, India is expected to get normal rainfall during the southwest monsoon season despite the evolving El Nino conditions, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said.
The IMD prediction is in variance with the forecast of Skymet Weather, a private forecasting agency which has predicted “below-normal” monsoon rains in the country. Skymet also does an annual monsoon forecast.
El Nino, which is the warming of the waters in the Pacific Ocean near South America, is generally associated with the weakening of monsoon winds and dry weather in India. It is one of the key parameters of the 15 plus parameter model employed by the IMD to make its annual long term mo soon forecast that is critical for the planning of agriculture and water resources management.
This week, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Senator Bob Menendez, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both asserted that Evan has been wrongfully detained by the Russian government. In a statement released on Thursday, Menendez referred to the “trumped up” charges on which Evan is held and urged the Russian government to give Evan access to U.S. consular officials. The denial of access is a blatant violation of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. In a rare joint statement released Friday, Senator Chuck Schumer and Senator Mitch McConnell demanded Evan’s immediate release.
Evan may be the latest in a string of Americans detained in Russia in recent years, but his case is fundamentally unlike all the others, for Evan was abducted simply for doing his job.
His arrest is more than just an assault on the freedom of the press: It is a signal of the grave new reality in which Russia is operating, in which all the old rules and norms no longer apply. Until recently, U.S. correspondents in Russia operated under the assumption that while the Kremlin might monitor their activities, Russian authorities would not target them in the same way that they have muzzled and jailed Russian journalists. Now, unfortunately, we know that is not true. To say that a line has been crossed is to understate the gravity of the situation.
The charges that Evan faces come with a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. He is now 31 years old. My mind does the math, but I refuse to write the grim possibilities down, to speak them into existence. I have to believe that we will get him home soon, but I also am all too aware — as is Evan, I’m sure — that the prognosis is not good. If, before the 2014 invasion of Ukraine, it may have been possible to try to reason with the Russian government, that is no longer the case. If there were once outside individuals — oligarchs, diplomats, businesspeople, cultural figures — who could possibly influence the Kremlin from within Russia, they are now few and far in between — too many have been exiled, silenced or co-opted. All this means that we have to look to new places, and to new partners, to advance his cause. Countries that retain active economic ties with Russia, such as India, Israel, Turkey, Brazil and South Africa may have more chances to raise Evan’s case. His arrest could be a signal that Russia is looking for another prisoner exchange, the same kind of trade that freed Brittney Griner. If that is the direction in which this is headed, it might work eventually. But it will probably be a long road.
For the past several years, Evan has been chronicling the gradual closing of a country that he came to love. In 2017, when he was offered reporting positions in Moscow and in Pittsburgh, he asked for my advice on how to choose between them. “Which one would you take, if you were Evan Gershkovich?” he asked. I told him to go to Moscow — I had seen so many colleagues start out as stringers for English-language newspapers abroad to go on to incredible careers — and I wished the same for him.
He moved to Russia to chase his journalism dream, but also because he believed it was important to capture life on the ground, to help Americans understand Russian culture and politics as intimately as he did. He wanted to write about the disappearing languages of Russia and its indigenous cultures; about Russian landfill closures and environmental degradation; about the arrests of journalists and dissidents who dared to speak out against the regime. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he helped me get in touch with Russian journalists who had been detained for their work for a story I was working on. It makes me ill to think that he is experiencing the same conditions that he was accustomed to reporting on.
We first met in college, where we traveled in the same circle of friends but were not, at first, that close. I distinctly remember bumping into Evan on the quad one day and hearing him speaking in Russian on the phone to one of his parents. After that, we bonded about being fellow children of Soviet emigrés in the U.S. — members of a subculture that was not, back then, terribly common at our small liberal arts college in coastal Maine. He worked as a cook at the on-campus pub as part of his financial aid package, and also as a staff writer covering arts and entertainment for the college paper, where I was an editor. He was still growing into himself as a writer — we all were — but he already had the winning combination of charisma, talent, kindness and humor that would propel him in the years to come.
In 2014, the summer after he graduated, he wrote to me from Thailand, where he was living on a reporting fellowship. He said he’d been reading my writing and asked for my advice about how to get a job in journalism when he came home. He would occasionally send me drafts of essays and pitches he was trying to place; he wanted to be a professional journalist more than anything and was stubborn and determined enough to make it happen. He was always hungry for advice and critiques, and positively exuberant about the possibility of being edited, which, in my opinion, is the mark of a truly good writer. “Don’t make fun of me but I’m here for the criticism!!!” was one of the messages he appended to a draft.
Several years ago, he asked me to take a look at an essay he’d written about surviving the 2015 earthquake in Kathmandu, where he’d been visiting toward the end of his fellowship year to help rural communities adapt to climate change. He had been in a café when the quake hit — a good Samaritan extracted him from behind a fallen bookcase — and spent the following three days working nonstop to feed hundreds of fellow survivors. In the essay he sent me, Evan referenced authors he had studied and admired, including George Saunders, Kathryn Schulz, Haruki Murakami and Leo Tolstoy, and quoted from The Death of Ivan Ilyich. The character he most related to, he wrote, was Schwartz, “the playful and lively guy who urges Piotr Ivanovich to not be despondent in the face of Ivan Ilyich’s death, who invites him over to his house for a card game that very night.” Schwartz, Evan wrote, was “joyful and playful, always, even in the face of tragedy and horror.”
So is Evan, as any of his friends will be quick to tell you. That’s why none of us were surprised to hear that he joked with the prison monitors who came to visit him at Lefortovo this week. It always cheered me to see his name pop up on my screen: “you up for a bit of banter on this Friday afternoon?” He’d message me with his anxieties, professional and personal — “stressed about FIFA”; “having trouble figuring out whom to pitch”; “I’m worried about my byline disappearing!” — and I’d share mine in turn.
In recent years, we’ve only kept in touch sporadically: He would request updates about my writing — he once promised to moderate a book event for me in Moscow — and told me: “I think you’d be proud of me — started meditating!” (Evan, when you read this: sorry.) In summer 2020, the day after my wedding, he messaged me from Moscow to say congratulations, adding that my husband’s salt-and-pepper hair was “looking FLY.” One of the benefits of marriage, he said, was that I’d “always have someone to kvetch to!”
I am scared for my friend. He’s great to kvetch to. The last time we really talked was over the summer, when he was heading back to Moscow to report. He was glad to be able to do so. He never for a minute regretted his choice to move to Russia and dedicate his career to covering the region. “100% the right decision to have come here,” he once wrote me. “Doing some stories I’m proud of.” Let’s make sure his byline does not disappear.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Hyderabad: Samantha Ruth Prabhu, the stunning actress who has won many hearts with her flawless acting abilities, has recently made headlines for her role in the upcoming series Citadel India. However, the actress has now revealed that she had another health problem while filming the project.
Samantha opened up about her health setback in a recent interview, stating that she had another problem while filming Citadel India. “I had a concussion on sets. I forgot everyone’s name for good two-three hours. To Raj, I was like, ‘Wait let me check my phone, what is his name?’ I hadn’t had a concussion before, I didn’t know how it felt, but I went back and shot after a few hours,” Samantha told Miss Malini.
Despite the fact that she did not reveal the specifics of her health issue, her fans are concerned for her well-being and wish her a speedy recovery.
In her interview with Bollywood Bubble, Samantha opened up on her struggle with the autoimmune disease myositis. She spoke about how she had lost control over how she looked during the course of the diagnosis of her disease.
Sam said, “One day I am puffy, one day I am fat, one day I am sick. I have no control over how I look. As an actor, your eyes are a medium to express emotions and every day, I wake up with pins and needles in my eyes. I am sensitive to light. I don’t wear glasses just for fun and style, the light actually affects my eyes. I have an intense migraine, and I have intense pain in my eyes, they swell from the pain and this has been the case for the past 8 months. This is probably the worst thing to happen to an actor.”
Despite her health issues, Samantha has poured her heart and soul into the series, which promises to be action-packed and fascinating. She has been seen in high-octane action sequences and has even been injured on set. The show’s creators have gone to great lengths to ensure Samantha delivers a memorable performance, even hiring a Hollywood action director to train her in martial arts.
Apart from Citadel, Samantha has two other exciting projects in the works Shaakuntalam, a mythological film starring Dev Mohan, and Kushi, starring Vijay Deverakonda. Her fans are excited about the release of these projects and are praying for her quick recovery from her recent health issue.
Moscow: Russia on Friday termed plans by NATO members Poland and Slovakia to send their Soviet warplanes to Ukraine attempts to dispose of antiquated equipment.
“This is another example of how a number of NATO member states, including Poland, are raising their direct involvement in the conflict,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said during his Friday press briefing, in a response to the recent announcements that Warsaw and Bratislava would send Soviet-designed MiG-29 warplanes to Kiev, RT reported.
It would not affect the outcome of Russia’s military operation but instead “may lead to additional suffering for Ukraine itself and its people”, he added.
“It seems like these countries (Poland and Slovakia) are just disposing of old equipment they no longer need,” Peskov said. The MiG-29 was designed in the 1970s and entered service in the 1980s.
Warsaw’s plan to transfer four of the MiG-29 fighters to Kiev “in the next few days” was announced by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki earlier this week. This makes Poland the first NATO country to pledge warplanes to Ukraine. The country has 28 MiG-29s, but it is unclear how many of them are in working condition, as the country has sought to update its air force with US- and South Korean-made fighters.
Slovakia, also a NATO member, similarly announced on Friday that it would send 13 of its MiGs to Kiev. However, the jets were retired last year, and several reports suggested that they were mostly not in operational condition.
Ukraine has been requesting warplanes, specifically American-made F-16s for its military, but US President Joe Biden said in January that they were not planning to send any over. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz similarly stated the same month that Berlin was not even discussing transferring its own F-16s.
French President Emmanuel Macron has sounded more vague, saying in January that he would not rule out sending fighter jets to Ukraine. UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced in February that London would be training Ukrainian pilots, adding that there was still no decision on actually sending Western-made fighter jets to Kiev.
Hyderabad: Prabhas, the pan-India star, has been preoocupied with his several upcoming projects. He has been seen attending the shoots of Adipurush, Salaar, Project-k, and Maruthi’s untitled film all at the same time. However, there is a new rumour in town stating that the actor has taken a long month break from all of the shoots and it is also being said that he flew to abroad.
What happened to Prabhas?
Lately, there have been rumors circulating in the film industry about Prabhas’ health. It was reported last month that he was suffering from a high fever, which caused him to take a break from filming. The latest rumor suggests that Prabhas has not fully recovered and has left for abroad for advanced treatment. However, there is no official statement on his health status and there is no clarity on his health issue.
In 2022, it was reported that Prabhas had underwent a big knee surgery in Europe. Fans are now wondering if his current trip to abroad is related to the same issue. Let’s wait for an official confirmation from the actor’s team.
Amidst all this, everyone is eagerly waiting for an update on the beloved actor’s health. We hope that Prabhas is doing well and will be back to full health soon.
“It’s important to remember that an individual’s health should be treated with sensitivity and respect, and we should avoid making unfounded assumptions or judgments based on rumors or photographs”.
Hyderabad: A middle-aged woman from Zambia, who was suffering from a very rare type of tumour called Paraganglioma, has been successfully operated upon at KIMS Hospital in Hyderabad.
Dr. Ramya Valiveru, an endocrine surgeon from KIMS Kondapur, successfully treated the patient by performing a complex surgery.
According to her, the occurrence rate of that Paraganglioma tumour is only two in one million population.
The doctor said, the patient was referred with primary complaints of severe fluctuating hypertension and uncontrolled giddiness. The government of Zambia referred her to the Endocrine Surgery department of KIMS Hospital Kondapur.
The patient had been suffering from severe recurrent headaches, episodes of anxiety, palpitations, and increased sweating for more than five years. She was evaluated in Zambia and was found to have a large 8.5×7.5 cm tumour in her abdomen.
“The tumour is a very rare type that was found to produce very high amounts of a hormone called noradrenaline. Also, the location of the tumour was in a critical zone, behind the large important vessels like Inferior Vena Cava and Aorta.
The blood vessels (veins) to both kidneys were travelling on the front of the tumour, the right kidney artery was travelling behind the tumour. All vessels were closely abutting the tumour,” explained Dr Ramya.
When the patient came to KIMS, she was noticed to have uncontrolled hypertension. She underwent extensive evaluation and optimal preparation for surgery. “Pre-operative preparation in such cases is the key to successful surgery.
Her endocrine control, hypertension control, and optimization were successfully done with alpha and beta blockade by Dr. Krishna Reddy, Consultant Endocrinology. Intra-operative fluctuations of BP and heart rate management is very challenging in this case.
According to Dr Ramya, surgery for Paragangliomas is different from the removal of other tumours. “The tumour can release hormones in a large quantity when touched, and cause a heavy load on the heart.
So, we had to perform the surgery so meticulously, and carefully handle the tumour, without damaging the kidneys and the great vessels.
The experienced team of anesthetists headed by Dr. Veera Bhadra Rao managed the patient during the surgery and the Postoperative Intensive care stay,” she said.
The patient had a smooth recovery in the post-operative period and has been discharged in stable condition.
If I had been told that my dream career could end up affecting my mental health, I might have thought twice about pursuing it. Or perhaps I wouldn’t have. After all, trauma is not new in journalism – “if it bleeds, it leads” is the adage.
But while crime and war correspondents know the risks they run, I fell into covering harrowing stories accidentally. I spent more than a decade on and off in the BBC newsroom, mostly in the user-generated content (UGC) hub team, dealing directly with the audience – finding case studies and trends, and tackling disinformation early by verifying stories before they were broadcast. Sometimes it was the best job ever, when the stories we covered could change people’s lives. Other times, the job meant scouring through racist and xenophobic missives, and exposure to pornography and graphic images of human remains. I would weep and feel hopeless about the world we inhabit, as we found ourselves mapping the geographies of murder, deconstructing images of beheadings, or cross-referencing atrocities on social media videos and open-source intelligence from far-flung places.
Increasingly, these tears were not isolated incidents. I couldn’t switch off after my 10-hour shifts and would keep tabs on stories that I was not on rota to cover – just wanting to help if I could, finding case studies in my “real life” and sending in tips. There was no balance. I kept checking social media in case I had missed something. When trolls messaged my team’s public WhatsApp number, I would reply to remind them there was a human behind that screen. I have always been sensitive: it is what made me good at the job. But it also made me more vulnerable. I lost weight because of the stress and sadness – what was the point in eating? In my head, I would keep replaying images of dead bodies, or stories of murdered children, wondering if anything could have been done.
‘I found I could no longer handle the tube at rush hour.’ Photograph: Jeffrey Blackler/Alamy
I found I could no longer handle the tube at rush hour. I was no longer me – the girl who liked wolves and biscuits and was capable of finding light and ridiculous things to counterbalance the sad stuff. I felt so lonely and guilty, so disappointed that the world was such a broken place, and I no longer knew what I could do to help fix it. I wanted to stop feeling so much and so empty at the same time. It was this alien experience that made me seek professional help, which is how I first heard about vicarious trauma.
…
The word trauma derives from the Greek word traumatikos, meaning pertaining to a wound, while vicarious comes from Latin, and means to substitute. But it was clinical psychologists Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman who coined the term vicarious traumatisation in 1990, while investigating how therapists were affected by what they were exposed to in the course of their work.
Vicarious trauma usually involves a cumulative effect. It is not just one event but many things that someone is exposed to over time, which lead to a cognitive shift in the way that person interacts with the world. Symptoms differ from person to person, but can involve flashbacks, intrusive thoughts and nightmares. Those affected can feel emotionally numb or hyper-aroused; they might engage in destructive and addictive behaviours, or feel as though they have lost a sense of meaning.
While the term was initially applied to therapists, it is widely recognised that people in a range of professions can be affected. There are studies looking at vicarious trauma and PTSD in drone operators, in healthcare professionals, in social work and among social media content moderators. Legal professionals run this risk, as do people in more informal situations, such as carers.
‘There are studies looking at vicarious trauma and PTSD in drone operators, in healthcare professionals, in social work, and of course, among social media content moderators.’ Photograph: David Parker/Alamy
Stories about traumatised content moderators are emerging around TikTok and associated contractors globally, and in the US a class action federal court case is underway against it and parent company ByteDance. So far, the public statements issued by TikTok in response to various content moderators’ allegations have focused on the company’s trust and safety team and how it partners with third-party firms on the “critical work” of helping to protect the platform and community. Spokespeople have also said the company continues to develop ways to “help moderators feel supported mentally and emotionally”.
In the US, Facebook (now Meta) recently agreed a $52m settlement to moderators who were diagnosed with mental health disorders, including PTSD, following a class action lawsuit led by Selena Scola. Chris Gray, who is based in Dublin, is pursuing legal action against Facebook Ireland and contractors CPL over his PTSD. He has just published an account of his experiences, The Moderator: Inside Facebook’s Dirty Work in Ireland, and tells me it wasn’t just the graphic imagery that affected him, but also having to deal with complaints, generally without any context, where people would report bullying or arguments playing out on the platform. “It’s like ‘you’re a bad parent’, ‘you’re a junkie’, ‘you’re a slut’ and then somebody’s mother joins in and they are arguing about their sad, awful lives. And then somebody thinks to use the reporting tool as a weapon and they start reporting each other,” he says.
Yelena McCafferty, a Russian interpreter and translator from Lincolnshire, says her job working in public service settings with the police and in courtrooms means she often can’t talk to anyone about what she hears because the material, which can range from petty theft to child abuse, is confidential. “Sometimes you just want to unburden it on to someone, but you can’t,” she says. She has accepted that sometimes she will have flashbacks about certain cases, adding: “Interpreters are neutral. We are there to facilitate communication, but we are not robots. Everything that the person says physically goes through us and comes out in the first person.” Now, she says, there is a growing openness in her industry about the traumatic elements of the job, with training and webinars offered to raise awareness.
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Pearlman, who is now partly retired, says her understanding and development of the concept of vicarious trauma emerged directly from her own personal experiences. Speaking to me from her home in Sarasota, Florida, she recalls a conversation one Christmas with McCann and other therapists about how she was not feeling her usual self. She knew it was not depression, but what was it? “We began to understand, in talking with our colleagues, that we were taking on the trauma experiences of our clients, and that we were feeling deeply affected in ways that changed our outlook on life and our experience of ourselves as people in the world, and also our ability to manage our feelings in a constructive way,” she says.
“I was always a very trusting person,” says Pearlman, “but I started to feel like questioning ‘What is that guy doing over there in that park with that young girl and is that a healthy relationship?’ and so on.”
How permanent such a shift can be is still unknown. It is something that my BBC journalist friend Alex Murray and I often discuss. As one-time colleagues in the UGC hub, we worked on many stories together, from the Arab spring to multiple terror attacks, school shootings, beheadings, war and more. But as Murray, who at one point was deeply immersed in the reporting of jihadi movements, says: “There was a group of us who were really good at it and we were really fast. And part of our vicarious trauma was that we felt because we were good at it and fast, it was easier for us to carry the burden and get it done quickly than watch other people, who found it more difficult, struggle with it.”
The work affected the two of us, but in different ways. I was afraid of the world, of building relationships, of trusting people in all aspects of my life. Murray says he stopped enjoying things that he used to find pleasurable – such as cycling – and he became irritable with his loved ones. When even his dog started to annoy him, he realised something was not right.
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Elana Newman, a professor of psychology at the University of Tulsa, and research director for the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, has extensive experience of working with journalists and lawyers. She says it is important to remember that vicarious trauma can lead to positive as well as negative cognitive shifts. Practically speaking, for example: “If you work with people who were hurt in a fire, you’re looking for exit signs.” Or a person may become more aware of all the beauty and courage in the world around them. This is something that Murray and I understand well.
Both of us have used our experiences at the BBC to try to help others, including taking part in several studies – one a groundbreaking 2014 investigation into reporting on user-generated content, which revealed that frequency of exposure to images of graphic violence was a risk factor for psychological injuries.
And to be fair to the BBC, when some of us in the team who had been having quiet conversations with each other about our worsening moods and feelings of guilt and anger eventually raised our concerns, we were introduced to our amazing colleagues at BBC Monitoring, who had far more experience of dealing with horrific stories. They shared coping strategies with us, such as turning off audio while watching graphic material and taking time to watch joyful cartoons. However, it did take a few years for more formal protocols to be implemented, and a significant industry-wide cultural shift had to occur before our teams understood that we did not always have to be the person to watch or work on stories or videos emerging from terror attacks, natural disasters or anything that could cause additional distress. Being diagnosed with vicarious trauma was not a condition for such consideration, either. The intent was to protect people from being at risk in the first place.
‘You may become more aware of all the beauty and courage in the world’ … Dhruti Shah. Photograph: Courtesy of Dhruti Shah
I first came across Sam Dubberley, a former newsroom manager at the European Broadcasting Union, when he, together with Haluk Mert Bal and Liz Griffin, was researching the effects of vicarious trauma on journalists, humanitarians and human rights workers. He is now managing director of the digital investigations lab at Human Rights Watch. He speaks regularly to his team about what they feel comfortable with investigating, and focuses on reducing the risk of vicarious trauma before it happens. He is especially concerned to include everyone who might be exposed to distressing material on a cumulative basis, such as receptionists responsible for monitoring an email address, archivists, video producers or IT support.
Newman says it is important to remember that being moved or upset by interacting with someone who is experiencing something terrible is part of “being a healthy functional person”. She stresses that there is a significant difference between having an emotional response that is “adaptive, proactive and socially and morally responsible” and having a psychological disorder. But if such a disorder occurs, it is important to act. Pearlman says connection with others, and deliberately building a sense of community, can be helpful. During the pandemic, and even now, she regularly has a group of other clinicians she checks in with. Eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing (a trauma therapy for reducing distress caused by memories) and cognitive behavioural therapy can help some people.
McCafferty says she visualises a waterfall whenever she needs to build a bit of distance between herself and a case she is working on. Like me and Murray, Chris Gray has written and speaks widely about his experiences at Facebook Ireland. We have all discovered that the global community that has built up around the awareness of vicarious trauma is very welcoming.
As for me, I eventually left the BBC Newsroom to re-find that curious soul who loved sharing tales of the wild and wonderful. I know I can no longer cover certain stories, but I am hopeful about what the future will bring.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
