The Ghosts Within: A Journalist’s Struggle With PTSD

Bringing the War Home In hindsight, I realize that some of my PTSD symptoms began to emerge in 2013—three years prior to my breakdown. Terry and I had decided that Owen should be home-schooled because of problems he was having in the local school. I took on the responsibility of teaching Owen (and two years later, my younger son, Morgan, too), which meant I had to cut back on my journalism work. I could no longer travel to Colombia to conduct investigative journalism in the country’s conflict zones, but I thought this period would only constitute a temporary respite and that I’d return to the front line in the future. Following this shift in my life, my behavior began to change. Perhaps my repressed emotional responses to past traumatic experiences subconsciously got the green light to come to the surface after I stopped working in Colombia. For most of my life, I had been a relatively positive, laid-back and socially engaged person. In the three years prior to my breakdown, however, I became increasingly irritable, angry, negative, distant, depressed and solitary. The idea that these changes were related to PTSD never occurred to me. But my behavior soon began negatively impacting my relationship with Terry, to the point that she began wondering how much longer she would be able to live with me. It caused massive anxiety for her. She never knew when she woke up each morning who she would encounter. Some days it would be the easygoing Garry of old. Other days it seemed that any simple act or conversation could trigger the emergence of an angry monster. I felt on edge all the time, and any sudden or loud noise could elicit an angry response. Consequently, Terry often walked on eggshells, particularly when she knew I was having a bad day. The most trivial incidents triggered disproportionate outbursts of anger. A Tupperware container without a lid resulted in the offending object being thrown across the kitchen. An uncooperative window blind could find itself beaten up. My forgetting to put out the recycling bags on pick-up day would trigger an angry outburst at myself, which could involve self-harm in the form of punching myself in the face. Fortunately, my anger never manifested itself in physical attacks on Terry or our sons. It only targeted inanimate objects and me. In fact, Owen and Morgan were a calming force. Their upbeat, positive energy was one of the only things that could make me feel good, and the thought of harming them was intolerable. Their presence often helped me be upbeat and positive. And in the darkest times, when I wished I would just die, the idea of actually taking my own life was inconceivable when I thought about how it would affect them. Terry, on the other hand, was not so lucky. She bore the brunt of my dysfunctional behavior on a regular basis. But she never gave up on me. During those years, my view of the world turned increasingly negative. I didn’t see any point in my journalism work, and I grew cynical about the human condition and society in general. As a result, I became alienated from myself. While my writing and teaching still reflected my belief that collective and compassionate action is necessary to achieve social change, I was personally becoming increasingly isolated and incapable of exhibiting compassion toward myself. I no longer wanted to socialize or participate in activism and social-justice events. We rarely invited people to our house, and I preferred that Terry socialize elsewhere. When I did go out, it was usually to be alone at a bar to watch a soccer game or read a book while enjoying a few pints. I used to be the center of the party. Now I wanted nothing to do with the party. Constant fatigue also appeared during those years, and I blamed my short fuse on that. Many mornings it took great effort to get out of bed—and some days I wouldn’t even bother. Instead, I would lie there, depressed and full of self-loathing. When I did get up, I felt lethargic throughout the day. I thought the fatigue and lethargy might be related to my bouts of insomnia, which were getting more frequent. Or that I had some sort of physical ailment. I went to the doctor, but blood tests and other physical exams didn’t provide an answer. I went to a naturopath, but adjustments to my diet failed to have an impact. I wondered whether it could be allergies, but testing dispelled that theory. The allergy doctor did say that many people in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia—where we lived—have sinus problems that present allergy-like symptoms but are caused by environmental irritants. Believing this to be the problem, the only solution I could come up with was to leave Cape Breton Island. But this was not a practical or desirable option, because Terry was a tenured professor at the university there, where I also taught part-time. My Emotional Breakdown In 2015, I was asked to teach a course on media and conflict at Javeriana University in Cali, Colombia. I was teaching the course for the third time when my emotional breakdown occurred in November 2016. Three days earlier, I had been speaking to two Colombian human rights workers about the deaths from malnutrition of more than 4,000 indigenous children over the previous eight years in northern Colombia. It was a region I had worked in on numerous occasions to investigate the human rights and environmental consequences of Latin America’s largest open-pit coal mine, which supplied coal to power plants in the United States, Canada and Europe. The foreign-owned mine was a major contributor to the children’s deaths because it used most of the region’s water, leaving an insufficient amount for local farmers to cultivate the crops they depended on for food. The day after that conversation, one of my students took me aside, and as tears welled in her eyes, pleaded with me to go to the Colombian Amazon to investigate armed groups who were forcing indigenous children into prostitution. It was a region I’d worked in only a few years earlier, where I had discovered that a Canadian mining company was exploring the possibility of extracting coltan, a rare metal situated on indigenous lands. Your support is crucial…

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