Walking through Paddy's Markets many years ago, I heard a sound like a gunshot and hit the dirt. An embarrassed boyfriend angrily pulled me up. I had just returned from the mayhem that was Belfast.
A newspaperman, who won't speak of a tough assignment in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, admits that when he got home, he just sat quietly in Centennial Park for days on end, watching the ducks, with never a word to anyone.
My brother, Terry Willesee, a Sky News journalist, tells of sailing through a speech at a business club breakfast. But, recounting his experience at the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, where 168 people were killed, he suddenly and inexplicably burst into tears. It was months since he'd been one of the first on the scene.
The humiliation for the ABC journalist Peter Lloyd was his arrest in Singapore for dabbling in amphetamines. He has reported developing an extreme sleep phobia following nightmares and flashbacks. Lloyd covered the Bali bombings and the Asian tsunami.
Journalists living with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are not rare. But many are ignorant of their own plight, let alone able to deal with it.
Even though there is a greater recognition today of duty of care, I wonder whether our news bosses are more attuned to the ramifications of PTSD than their predecessors in generations past.
The newspaperman says the usual remedy was booze, lots of it, to such an extent that "plenty of journalists drank themselves to death without understanding why". In his experience, journos never expressed fears or stresses, "we just drank another bottle of Scotch".
Many clinicians recognise PTSD as occurring after exposure to life-threatening events. And a large part of the treatment is to talk the events dry of their power.
So it doesn't help if journalists perceive it to be seriously uncool to flaunt tales of their adventures or the ills that flow from them - and so deprive themselves of "talking therapy" among colleagues.
While most reports are clean of emotive, first-person details, there's no way to edit the psyche. It routinely stores all the confronting images of inhumanity. And when we're at a low ebb, physically or mentally, it strikes.
It snuck up on me almost a decade ago when serious illness put me in intensive care, loaded up with morphine and non-stop hallucinations of a man with a gun trying to get into the ward. Where did it come from? I knew of a woman shot dead in her hospital bed in Belfast, where I had lived and worked and routinely found myself in the gunsights of patrolling British soldiers.
During the 1981 hunger strike deaths, Belfast usually went quiet in the late afternoon as rioting citizens went home for dinner. Walking along a deserted Falls Road, I heard the armoured van scream around the corner, and a person holding a gun took aim at me. I crouched behind scaffolding on the footpath. He fired from about 15 metres away. A plastic bullet ricocheted off the steel and almost gently it hit me.
This was a relatively small incident but my psyche tucked away the experience. As it did with the baby girl who died in my arms from starvation in an Ethiopian refugee camp. And the images from apartheid South Africa of a woman being stoned with a flaming tyre around her neck. It was the pornography of death and my job was to watch it.
Terry's memory that won't die is of two women looking for a husband and a child after the Oklahoma City bombing. They came to him asking if he thought their loved ones might be OK. The answer was numbingly clear.
For the newspaperman, it is the Bengali bloke who was going to lead him and a colleague over the border during the Bangladesh war except his body was found impaled on a tree with Pakistani bayonets. A lucky escape, he concedes.
The irony is that many journalists beg to cover the big, dramatic stories of the day. It's the whole reason you become a journalist. In my first interview for a cadetship I was asked my ambition. I wanted to be a war correspondent.
The battle Lloyd now faces, as real-life events that he has witnessed warp into life-threatening nightmares, demands compassion and every ounce of help the media industry can muster.
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