April 2019

I wish I had learned much earlier how to take care of myself while working on assignments concentrated on trauma. I also wish that this industry would collectively agree to stop pushing the expectation that journalists should sacrifice acknowledging mental health struggles for the sake of constant productivity. 

I listened to my fellow students’ experiences with sexual assault, harassment and victim-blaming, and pored over disturbing descriptions in police and court documents. As expected, many throughout the reporting process tried to brick-wall transparency about university information and lacked candidness in conversation. 

I’m thankful I had the opportunity to complete this project, and I recognize what a privilege it is that people in my community trusted me with their stories, knowledge and time. Public service is why I want to be in this field, and even in my short beginnings so far, sometimes that means exposing yourself to secondary trauma. Over the past year, I have learned that I am not alone in the ranks of journalists who feel mental health should be addressed more within media organizations.

Journalists report on mental health in the workplace, accessibility to treatment for mental illness and the stigmas associated with discussing mental illness. Admittedly, mental health news coverage could still improve in many ways, but we're not even applying what we learn from reporting to the way we manage our own industry. 

This project has solidified to me that journalists are not robots, nor should we be. Empathy is a superpower, and it is not mutually exclusive to professionalism and the ability to seek the truth. Making sure that you’re not racing toward burnout by checking in on your mental health is not a task we should be designating to the back burner anymore.

I am thankful that I have been encompassed by supportive mentors, friends, and faculty in the University of Arizona journalism school and by others in the industry. I hope journalism schools and newsrooms can start having more transparent conversations about mental health on the job and start to unpack the outdated attitude that people should feel guilty for opening dialogues about it.

The Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma has resources for both journalists and news consumers on managing mental health across a spectrum of topics. At Psychology Today, you can search for therapists by accepted insurance, language, type of therapy, and proximity. The Health Resources and Services Administration also has a database of facilities that offer low-fee, sliding scale, or free care to people in lower income brackets.

The Reporting Process 

Here is a snapshot of some of the reporting elements for this project:

• Inspection of 90 sexual offense reports made to University of Arizona Police Department in five years. (Reading them, organizing the information manually one-by-one into digital spreadsheets, fact-checking the correct locations of each case, and loading them into a data-point map)
• Tucson Police Department records requests for apartment complexes and sexual assaults within a one-mile radius of campus 
• Many interviews with UA stakeholders and students about the scope of the problems and possible solutions for them
• Within the University of Arizona, some interview requests to UA employees were either re-routed to the same communications personnel or refused altogether. One record request to the university was also intentionally delayed for no legitimate legal reason.
• The video project: sourcing the participants, planning the studio sessions, the on-camera interviews, and editing video/audio
• Building a website (with help from Prof. Mike McKisson)
• Planning a defense presentation

While all of this work was happening, our newest Supreme Court Justice was being accused of sexual assault, "Surviving R. Kelly" amplified what many women had been saying for years, the U.S. Secretary of Education was outlining controversial Title IX changes, Tucson was learning about UA athletics’ history of sex abuse and domestic violence thanks to The Arizona Daily Star, and the world was reckoning with its track record of how it treats people who step into the public eye to share their sexual assault stories.

This reporting process would not have been possible without the people who trusted me with their stories and their guidance. Thank you to my project committee (Jeannine Relly, Nancy Sharkey, and Rogelio Garcia), everyone in the journalism school, sexual assault survivors, and my family for supporting this project.