Reporter’s Notebook | The quiet terrain of mental health in a loud profession

By Nicholas House | May 29, 2025 | Reporter's Notebook |

By Nicholas House
Navajo Times

There are moments – quiet, mostly – when the story is submitted, and the MacBook screen fades to black. When headlines are filed, inboxes go still, and the adrenaline that once kept the body upright dissolves into silence. It’s in those moments that the weight sets in. Not the weight of deadlines, but of stories. The ones that stay with you.

Working as a journalist means navigating a terrain that is simultaneously intimate and vast. The network of our occupation stretches from next door neighbors to U.S. senators, from school board meetings to global conflicts. Our days are spent stitching together a patchwork of voices, events, and truths, and often, we do so without tending to our own.

Mental health in journalism is rarely part of the story. Yet it is in every story. Because bearing witness comes with a cost. Every eviction documented and the stories untold, every mother mourning a child lost to overdose, every veteran struggling to access care, these stay in the margins of your mind, long after your name is printed on the page.

It’s not only journalism we’re juggling. For many of us, there’s also school, family, identity, an entire personal life carried behind the byline. We shift from covering a housing hearing to submitting a research paper before midnight. We go from interviewing a grieving community to comforting our own. It’s a brutal kind of multitasking, and it doesn’t end when the laptop closes. In college hallways, we’re expected to be students. In newsrooms, professionals. At home, caretakers or survivors. Each role demands something different – time, intellect, empathy – and we rarely stop to ask what’s left for ourselves. The boundary between reporter and person blurs until self-care feels like a luxury we can’t justify. And still, we push through. Not because it’s easy, but because we believe the work matters. But believing doesn’t mean we’re immune to collapse.

We aren’t always taught how to carry that weight. Nor are we taught what happens when the pressure builds in silence. Some days, the impact is immediate: sleeplessness, emotional fatigue, a sense of disconnect from the very community we aim to serve. Other times, the cost compounds over years, until we find ourselves untethered, not knowing when we crossed the line from passionate to burnt out.

What complicates it further is how invisible the boundary can be. Our profession thrives on speed and presence. We’re told to jump into crisis, to be available, to respond. But very little of that discipline is matched by a culture of restoration. We rarely ask: what does this do to a person, to absorb trauma in fragments every day? What does it mean when we archive everyone’s stories but never pause to process our own?

The emotional terrain we walk is a kind of jungle, dense, unpredictable, full of hidden entanglements. And the hardest part? For one voice, it often feels like standing in water with no gauge of its depth. You know it’s rising, but you don’t know how far it goes, or how long you can tread.

That depth doesn’t only belong to the reporter. It belongs to the reader, the source, the public servant, the parent, the neighbor. Because our words ripple. What we write, what we question, what we frame, it enters homes, stirs memories, shapes policies, and sometimes scars.

We often focus on the duty to inform. But we should also remember the duty to heal. To acknowledge that behind every notebook is a person trying to make sense of a world that rarely slows down.

Journalism is a calling. But it is also a life. And if we are to continue telling the truth with clarity and courage, we must learn to protect our mental landscapes with the same tenacity we apply to our deadlines.

Because stories, like water, move in currents. And the ones we carry deserve a safe place to land.