From the young producer who used to say to his bosses, “give me the hardest story you’ve got and I’ll take it on!”… to the more experienced journalist who went on to battle crippling anxiety and trauma-affected sleep, Sky News producer and psychotherapist James Scurry will offer his insights into the gradual way what he witnessed in the newsroom led to the trauma he realised he needed to face.
James will speak candidly about his own experiences covering the violent decade beginning with the fall of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011 and the Arab Spring, to the subsequent rise of the Islamic State. He charts how his own deteriorating mental health led him to train as a psychotherapist, and how he subsequently came to understand that the journalists’ own mental health has a direct and significant impact on everything from written copy and headlines to the way in which we conduct interviews.