Professor Jesús Ayala once hailed managing stress as his “superpower.” After all, his composure came in handy as a traveling news producer for ABC. And a rising star at that. His work brought him to conflict zones, hostile environments and natural disasters, with headline coverage of Hurricane Katrina, the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the Copiapó mining rescue all under his belt. His name grew, but so did the pressure.
Eventually, Ayala felt more on edge. The fast-paced environment, coupled with regular encounters with death and destruction, ultimately caught up with the Los Angeles-based journalist. His struggles were initially “very minor.” But without proper journalism training on trauma, he ignored the red flags, and the cameras kept rolling.
“I was very proud of the fact that I could remain calm and unflappable whenever I covered these stories,” said Ayala. “Now, in retrospect, I realized that I was able to do that because I was not coping mentally well. I was really dissociating and not addressing a lot of my emotions. That allowed me to remain robotic, which I thought was a strength. But now I realize, wow, buddy, you had it all wrong.”
As his symptoms progressed, Ayala experienced anxiety, nightmares and panic attacks — at his lowest, he slept roughly two hours a night. What he once called a superpower resurfaced as his kryptonite. He sought help from medical professionals, who diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stemming directly from his journalism career.
At the time, mental health remained relatively uncharted territory. So, Ayala found little solace in his colleagues and mentors, even those who clearly experienced trauma while on the job themselves. The profession’s old guard seemed more preoccupied with how his diagnosis would impact his career advancement at a time when reporters usually checked their emotions at the door.
They were not necessarily wrong either: Ayala recalled missing many birthdays as an entry-level reporter tackling the last pick stories. Respected veteran journalists suggested he keep his head down and “compartmentalize” or risk fumbling away the best assignments.
Initially, Ayala tried remaining on the job by white-knuckling through the PTSD. But reporting retriggered him, often leading him to hide in the bathroom, suffering silent panic attacks, before assignments.
“That process was incredibly hard,” he said. “It kind of bruised my ego, because I frankly wasn't ready to leave. The diagnosis came for me a little bit out of nowhere, and so if I had it my way, I wouldn’t have left. It may get to the point where you really want to do something, and then your body or mind just won't let you anymore.
“I had worked so hard to get to the pinnacle, and I was now part of the ‘A team,’ so I was getting the best stories. To have to leave at the peak of my career, over this — it created a bit of shame in the beginning.”
Class in session
His next chapter remained in question after leaving journalism. Ayala never considered teaching. But he serendipitously accepted an invitation to speak at a college journalism conference at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB) after taking some time off.
“So, I just came in, and students wanted to know about what it's like to work in TV news,” he said. “For an hour, I just talked about my job and what it entailed. And I remember that after my panel was over, students came up to me, just curious. They wanted career advice. And I remember saying out loud, like, ‘Oh, wow, that was actually so much fun — I could do this all day.’ And mind you, that was probably the first time that I actually enjoyed something in a very long time since leaving ABC. And I noticed that my body, for the first time, felt some joy.”
The person who invited Ayala to speak encouraged him to pursue teaching. Thanks to his master’s degree, he qualified. The idea remained in the back of his head as he spent the next few months taking on a few fellowships. Yet the joy of speaking at the journalism conference lingered, and Ayala decided to follow up. He reached back out to CSULB. The school lacked an open role for him, but it recommended putting his name out there to other universities.
Ultimately, Ayala kicked off his teaching career a short drive away as a full-time instructor at Cal State University, Fullerton. He spent five years there and fell in love with the work. Others noticed his propensity and advised him to pursue a tenure-track position at another university. And coincidentally, there was an opening back at CSULB.
But with tenure track comes the research agenda that instructors do not need to concern themselves with. Ayala needed to contribute to the public understanding of an issue. Initially, he planned to focus on diversity due to his experience working with bilingual students and mentoring Black and brown students. The concept never clicked, so he went back to the drawing board, asking himself what he would have wanted as a j-school student at the University of Southern California.
Well, he recounted studying under great professors. They taught him all the technical skills he needed to rise through ABC News’ ranks. Ayala learned how to write a story, interview a source, shoot video and edit it.
“But the one area where I felt cheated — it took me back to my PTSD diagnosis,” said Ayala. “For me, getting that diagnosis was like a complete shock. How come no one warned me? How come one ever said, ‘By the way, FYI, if you go down this road, be careful, because if you're not processing emotions properly … you might get into dangerous territory.’ I thought it was so interesting that I had attended a premier journalism school where I was properly trained. And yet the one thing that no one warned me about was that mental health component.”
Minding his business
Ayala’s research ultimately made him an expert on mental health in the journalism industry. The concept is not neuroscience. Well, at least not figuratively. He points to how unaddressed trauma builds up from tense reporting assignments and impacts the nervous system.
“Our nervous system is designed to help us survive,” said Ayala. “And [when] we’re covering a traumatic story, the best way that our nervous system knows to keep us safe is by dissociating. Most people will say, ‘Oh, when I was covering this story, I kind of felt numb.’ That’s dissociation. Your nervous system knows that you’re in a dangerous situation.”
Dissociation can pop up as a defense mechanism through both physically dangerous and emotionally-charged situations. Ayala likens the process to hiding in a cocoon, which allows reporters to temporarily manage their distress. It helps them get through the story. But Ayala said that once the situation passes, the reporter needs to properly process their emotions. And a fast-paced news environment rarely affords time to digest an assignment before the next one.
From his own reporting, Ayala encountered a mass grave while covering the 2010 Haitian earthquake. To this day, he vividly remembers witnessing thousands of dead bodies. He knew a real emotional response would be devastating. Yet at the time, he did not react. “That just goes to show you how dissociated I was, that I am seeing a mass grave with thousands of bodies.”
His research also frequently examines mass shootings after he covered seven throughout his ABC News career, including the 2012 Aurora movie theater shooting. He said they are particularly difficult stories to cover, especially if they involve children.
And if reporters face these issues, naturally so do those closest to the story. Ayala said the first pillar of “trauma-informed” journalism is the victims. The second is the journalist’s own safety. And he corrects the record on the old adage of “there are no dumb questions.”
“When we encounter victims, we want to ask, ‘How did it feel?’” said Ayala. “As journalists, we try to go for the emotional sound bites. We want to aim for the heart. We want something that’s emotional. If we ask the victim, ‘Hey, how did it feel?’, we know we’ll elicit an emotional response. But again, it’s important to understand how the nervous system works. Because that person is in a state of shock, and so they’re probably dissociated.
“I always tell students, we meet a lot of these victims on the worst day of their lives. For you to come and say, ‘Hey, what does it feel like?’, that person may not be ready to go there. You may trigger them, and you may get them to start processing feelings earlier than they should. You never want to be responsible for that.”
Examining Uvalde
Last year, research by Ayala and his former student Raya Torres on the trauma responses of journalists who covered the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was accepted for publication. They examined what physical and emotional stressors came with reporting on tragedy over the course of a year.
“Usually when you have mass shootings, journalists come in for a very small window of a week or two weeks, and then leave,” said Ayala. “And then suddenly the community is forgotten. Uvalde was so interesting because journalists came and many stayed for a long time. In fact, [my old network] ABC established a Uvalde Bureau, and they called it Uvalde 365. They had a rotating cast of producers and reporters that came through for a full year, and we were able to interview a lot of the people who stayed for a long time.”
“Our study found that 87.1% of the journalists who covered Uvalde had some form of either physical or emotional reaction that would be linked to trauma. It just goes to show again, you can’t be telling a journalist to leave their emotions at the door when clearly they’re having emotional reactions to covering trauma. Most of the people [surveyed] had some form of traumatic reaction.”
The 2022 shooting left 22 people dead, including the gunman. Among those victims were 19 children. Respondents recalled experiencing a “jolt” of adrenaline when arriving at the scene. Some witnessed parents discovering their children were among those dead in real time. “The worst part about my job is hearing a mom scream for her child,” one reporter recounted. “It’s such a visceral sound. You can feel it, you can hear it, and it sends chills up your spine.”
Those chills were just some of the physical responses documented by Ayala and Torres in their research. Reporters recounted dissociation, emotional detachment and numbness. Six months into the story, some experienced crying, hyper-vigilance and neck pain. There were digestive issues, exhaustion and brain fog.
Ultimately, Ayala and Torres put their research into a half-hour documentary called “Reporting from Uvalde.” Journalists who covered the shooting reflected on coping and suppressing their emotions while on the assignment. Some got quite vulnerable and talked into the camera about struggling to eat dinner or drinking more alcohol. And they grieved for children they never met.
“Journalists said, ‘I’ve never met these kids, but I feel like I know them. I feel like I love them,’” said Ayala. “It was really interesting, how you start to write about these stories, and a year in, you’re caring about these families as if they were your own.”
An agent of change
For Ayala, life slowed down after entering teaching, even as he continues reporting on stories like his documentary now. He credits similar efforts across the profession, particularly on the opposite coast at Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, with driving the narrative. And the numbers seem to be growing.
“It starts with just being willing to talk about it,” said Ayala. “I think sometimes schools don’t talk about it because they might not have the knowledge. Well, we teach what we know, right? If someone doesn’t know or it’s not their area of specialty, it goes unaddressed. But the other reason — and this is more of an industry failure — why schools don’t teach it [is] because they don’t realize they have to. We train students to be fair and impartial, and sometimes we assume that that means that they should be unemotional.
“But as more professors do that 360 where they are leaving industry, going back to teaching … there are a lot of colleagues of mine that went into the industry [and] realized that this mental health component was not being addressed. And then as they became professors, they realized, ‘Oh, wow, we have to start talking about it now.’”
Tandy Lau is an award-winning journalist currently based in Jersey City. He currently works as a staff reporter covering public safety for the New York Amsterdam News in Harlem. He can be contacted at tandylau1995@gmail.com
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