For decades, Dean Yates decades was the ideal warzone correspondent: courageous, compassionate, dedicated.
After years of facing the worst moments imaginable - including the Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami, it was one final incident which undid him.
In July 2007, two of his staff members were brutally gunned down by an American helicopter in Iraq. What followed was an unravelling of everything Dean thought he knew of himself. His PTSD was compounded by his moral wound - the devastation of what he thought he knew of the world and his own character and beliefs.
To get better took a while. Years of treatment, including several stints inside a psychiatric facility.
But he did get better, and is doing a lot better - and it’s so important to know that you can treat these kind of issues.
Your life doesn’t have to be horrible. But you have to want to get better, and you have to be willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
This conversation talks about Moral Injury, PTSD, describes some pretty reprehensible acts of violence, and crosses into discussing suicide.