Line in the Sand

Workplace mental health expert Yates, an Australian former journalist, blends mental health education with confessional memoir in this raw, wrenching first-person narrative. He was Reuters’s Baghdad bureau chief when, on July 12, 2007, an American helicopter strike in Iraq left two of his staffers, Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, dead. Yates experienced guilt, shame, and the feeling that he failed to protect his team or to challenge the military’s account of their deaths. As a result of that, reporting from war and disaster zones, and witnessing horrors and injustices intensified by perceived indifference and betrayal by Reuters leadership, he developed PTSD. Feeling both anger and apathy, he writes that he behaved in selfish and harmful ways with loved ones. He pursued treatment for his mental health. For a decade, he worked through his trauma, better managed his emotional responses, and learned to help others and himself. This book shares and describes the pain he and his loved ones experienced, the scientific and spiritual dimensions of his illnesses, his approaches to coping, and the ways many institutions fail to address mental health needs.