Topic Tuesday // Supporting someone dealing with PTSD // Tues. 27 Feb. 7pm - 9pm AEDT

This Topic Tuesday we'll be focusing on supporting someone experiencing PTSD. Our special guest @DeanYates will be talking from his own first hand experience of PTSD - how it developed, his symptoms, what helped and what didn't.

Dean Yates, 49, has been a journalist, bureau chief and editor for Reuters, the international news service, for 25 years. He has reported extensively on war, conflict and natural disasters in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. While the Reuters bureau chief in Baghdad in 2007, three of Dean’s Iraqi staff were killed, two by a U.S. Apache helicopter.

Dean was diagnosed with PTSD in March 2016. He spent five weeks in the Ward 17 psychiatric unit at Melbourne’s Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in Aug-Sept 2016. He was readmitted for three weeks in July 2017. Besides PTSD, Dean has moral injury.

Since May 2017, Dean has been head of journalist mental health and wellbeing strategy at Reuters, a newly created position for the company’s 2,600 staff around the world.

Below are some of the articles published about Dean's experience. Please be aware that some of the content in the links below could be triggering as they talk in detail about the distressing experiences Dean had during his time as a journalist.

In November 2016, Reuters published Dean’s account of his battle with PTSD. Click here

The ABC did this story on Dean in July 2017.

Columbia Journalism Review did a profile on Dean in this November 2017 story.

Join us from 7pm AEDT, Tuesday 27 Feb.

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