Iranian journalists suffer PTSD from trauma on the job: Study
In the fall of 2014, the Canadian-Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari was making the media rounds, his memoir about his time in Iran's Evin prison had been adapted into a film "Rosewater," directed by the TV host Jon Stewart.
Maziar Bahari stressed at the time... his ordeal was all-too-common among Iranian journalists.
Together with psychiatrist Dr. Anthony Feinstein, Maziar Bahari has gone to great lengths to survey Iranian journalists. They have found that a shockingly high number of them have been harassed, detained and tortured. And a great deal suffer from mental health problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
The part that surprised me about the results were the high levels of stress that the Iranian journalists confront.- Dr. Anthony Feinstein
114 journalists participated in the study, the results:
• 58.8% have been arrested
• 19.3% tortured
• 61.4% intimidated
• 10.5% assaulted
• 52.6% reported that their family had been threatened because of the work they had undertaken
• 78.1% reported that they had had to stop work on a story because of threats, intimidation or assault
• 61.4% reported being under surveillance or being monitored by the state
Anthony Feinstein is a Psychiatrist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto and a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto. In 2003, he published a landmark study of journalists working in war zones. It's called "Dangerous Lives: War and the men and women who report it."
Maziar Bahari was jailed in 2009 for 118 days in Iran's Evin prison. His memoir is "Then They Came for Me."
This segment was produced by The Current's Gord Westmacott.