Shilling for the Democrat Party can be stressful apparently

I kid you not:

"Journalists can experience powerful frustration and demoralization," said Dr. Ochberg, "especially when they go literally to the ends of the earth and subject themselves to physical and emotional risk. And they realize that their job is to bring back information that only falls on deaf ears. All their work might just end up in flaming passion and no solution."

Combat veterans, police on the beat, battered spouses and ambulance technicians are among the most frequent sufferers. They report combinations of unshakable memories, isolation and anxiety for no logical reason. In severe cases, victims can get startled uncontrollably, can barely sleep and become severely - even suicidally - depressed.

At least two Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalists have fixated on self-destruction. In August 2006, a despondent New Orleans Times-Picayune photographer, John McCusker, became so desperate over the loss of his home after Hurricane Katrina that he assaulted police officers and begged them to shoot him.

In 1993, Kevin Carter photographed a starving child being stalked by a vulture in Africa. Within a year, he had killed himself, and his suicide note cited the images from his journalistic work, along with financial and other personal issues.

Making matters worse is that journalists volunteer for these difficult experiences and some get addicted to the "fight or flight" levels of adrenaline that the human body produces naturally.

Journalists also try to juggle being neutral, objective, professional and constantly alert, a kind of macho cross between the spirit of public service and scientific self-restraint.

"The role of being 'objective' can be quite a burden," said Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center.

Umm... if being objective is as big a burden as is being said here, then most journalists ought to be about as relaxed as a Caribbean Islander.

Comments

[Mommynator]

In my class, there is a paramedic. She's seen all kinds of gross things from heads rolling from their bodies, to car accidents where the victim's skull felt like a bag of rattly ice to other such things. The police and fire department who show up at these scenes also see this stuff. Battered spouses end up in the hospital with all kinds of horrific damage both physical and emotional.

You cannot convince me that today's journalists who pick and choose which facts they will present as the truth are traumatized like that. Maybe that's their problem - they know they have to lie to re-create the world as they think it should be instead of reporting on how it really is.

[Not used to vultures eating kids]

I don't know. I think the vulture thing would get me down.

[Morgan K Freeberg]

Making matters worse is that journalists...get addicted to the "fight or flight" levels of adrenaline that the human body produces naturally.

I wonder if there is an agent produced by the body's glands that cause one to spew liberal slogans that don't make any sense? If that be the case, it seems that one is just as addictive if not moreso.

[petite flower]

Sorry guys, but this is just an attempt by pundits (not journalists because they don't exist anymore) to equate themselves to soldiers, paramedics and peace officers.

[west_rhino]

One supposes the 200 and 2004 elections were traumatic enough to still find the cognative dissonance of a lack of leftist veracity. Odd that only photojournalists were the named examples. They went forth looking for, often for the gruesome, they came, they saw, they made sure you got the same oft jaundiced view their writing brethren and sisters cast forth. It seems like one that sold out for thirty pieces of silver, maybe they developed a conscience, maybe they had another raison d'etre (financial and "other" was it?) that with a thousand other mosquito stings set them off.

That piece offers a hypothesis, but is hardly a peer reviewed, scholarly study of the psychoses inherent in the narcissistic minds of the left or the fifth column inch of fifth columnists rising in support of them.