If a central purpose of the ESTSS is to raise social awareness of psychological trauma and how best it should be handled, one of the key instruments to make that happen has to be a deeper and more trusting relationship between mental health professionals (MHPs) and the media.

Yet it's only very recently that psychiatrists, psychologists and psychotherapists on the one hand, and journalists on the other have begun to reach out to each other - to start to learn how trauma might be best understood and portrayed in the media, to encourage experts to agree on a consistent message, and to help to get that across to the public.

The ESTSS is now playing an important role in this process of professional bridge-building, with a series of workshops now under its belt organised in the last couple of years in partnership with the European arm of the Seattle-based Dart Centre for Journalism and Trauma.

Colleagues in the ESTSS may have attended one or other of the Dart Centre's presentations and discussions at conferences and workshops in Berlin, Zagreb, Istanbul, Stockholm, Amsterdam, and most recently in Belfast - and are encouraged to join the discussions that are coming up at EWOTS in Madrid in October, and next year at the Society's major conference in Croatia.

The Dart Centre in Europe, as those who have attended its workshops will know, has a four-fold mission:

• It is a forum and resource for promoting the ethical, sensitive and informed reporting of tragedy and violence;
• It supports the education of working journalists and journalism students in the science and psychology of trauma and its impact;
• It develops and promotes the organisational, peer-led and individual support of journalists and teams who cover trauma;
• And it supports and disseminates research and best practice in the field of journalism and trauma.

In Belfast, Dart aimed to do that with two events - first a day-long workshop on journalism and trauma at the Northern Ireland Headquarters of the BBC, just opposite the conference venue in the Holiday Inn, with a small group of journalists from Northern Ireland and the UK, but also from Serbia, Iraq, Germany and the Czech Republic. (There's a full report on that day at the Dart Centre website, at http://www.dartcentre.org.)

And on the first day of two-day EWOTS itself, Dart brought several of those journalists, plus a few more local reporters, together with a number of ESTSS delegates, to consider how the two professions might work better together.

The interactive structure of that forum saw journalists and mental health professionals taking part in role-plays to respond to hypothetical incidents, such as a patient who left the psychiatric ward of a local hospital and killed a passer-by, or a stadium collapse during a football match with dozens of people killed and injured.

Oscar Daly, Northern Ireland psychiatrist and member of Dart Europe's Advisory Board, said that from the mental health professionals' view, bridges have not been built with the media, and he encouraged his colleagues to take the initiative.

The role-play highlighted how arches were being extended from either shore, but how wide the gap remains which needs to be bridged.

While the mental health professionals were, for example, concerned first to extend sympathies to the families of those affected by tragedy, including reassurances that violence by escaped mental patients is extremely rare, the journalists were far less interested in condolences than in solid information about any threat to the public.

Oscar Daly sought common ground. "At times," he said, "patient confidentiality can be trumped by the need to inform the public. On occasion, the name of the patient can even be given to the media for publication, together with the advice that he/she not be approached but rather the police contacted."

Clearly, said Daly, information regarding the actual illness or medication the patient is receiving cannot be released - but he stressed the need at the same time for the mental health community to respond quickly. "Otherwise journalists will simply go elsewhere for their information."

Bruce Shapiro, the Dart Center's New York-based Field Director, encouraged both communities to build solid and trusting relationships before traumatic news hits the headlines, so that when bad things do happen, each knows to whom they can turn, whom they can trust, and with whom it is safe indeed to speak off the record.

That pre-existing relationship with sources, said Shapiro, is something that political and security correspondents take for granted. It should also be the true of local correspondents - although several psychologists and psychiatrists at the workshop noted wryly that it can be for them a sackable offence to speak off-the-record to the press.

"The relationship is important - get to know who you would trust," said Seamus Kelters of BBC Northern Ireland. "If you know you can trust this person, you can say that something is off-the-record. If the journalists says it's purely for my guidance, then I know that I can't report that. You can also negotiate what it means or clarify what is off-the-record."

In the second role play, where a stand collapses at a football match in Belfast, the BBC's Mervyn Jess and Oscar Daly demonstrated two versions of how a mental health professional might deal with a challenging interview - one in which the reporter is both informed and considerate, and other in which he is pushing for sensation.

In a convincing and educative performance, Daly held his own in the face of, at times, considerable provocation - and the outcome of both sessions was that a consistent, interesting and also reassuring message was conveyed, without denying the journalist a good and usable interview.

Chairing the workshop, the Dart Centre's European Director Mark Brayne, himself a former BBC and Reuters foreign correspondent and now a practising psychotherapist, encouraged his former journalistic colleagues to look beyond "the fear, the alarm and the blame."

Brayne noted the parallels between what he termed McNews - knee-jerk journalism that appeals unthinkingly to the limbic system's evolutionary interest in violence and threat - and Fast Food that sells fat-laden hamburgers and sugary drinks. Both, he said, were no longer appropriate for human survival in the 21st century.

There was a lively discussion. Mervyn Jess disagreed that breaking news was essentially sensationalist. "These are 'newsworthy' pieces, not 'sensationalist'," Jess said. "For example, if the mental health professionals said 'Don't go near that person, go to the police," this is not sensationalism but advice, and information that really counts."

In terms of crisis planning and management, a major concern for those present at the forum was how to improve relations with the media and to get information and messages out to the public.

A representative from the Home Office said that after the July 7th bombings in London in 2005, media coverage of an emergency response centre set up near Victoria station was inadequate, and it was difficult to get important information out to the public.

"The role of the media in reporting needs to be separated out from their role in providing public service information," Shapiro said. "The media can be used as a civil society organisation to make available public service information, but you can't necessarily expect news reports to carry that information."

The concern on the part of the Home Office representative was how to set up a supportive environment in the centre without the intrusion of the media, but at the same time, to "feed the media," as Brayne put it, and get important information across.

"The thinking on the official side," said Brayne, "has been for too long that the media are the problem and that they need to be managed and kept at arm's length. The media are in fact part of the solution and need to be brought into the heart of emergency planning."

The issues raised at the forum, in summary, involved:

• The need for building relationships ahead of time;
• The need for journalists and mental health professionals to be aware of the very different demands and needs of each of their respective communities;
• Journalists who wrongly believe that counselling is the recommended first-line response to trauma should familiarise themselves with the guidelines of Britain's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), which discourage single-session psychological debriefing for individuals after a traumatic experience
• The media should be routinely included in the psychological as well as logistical dimensions of civil emergency planning.

Refqa Abu-Remaileh, Projects Coordinator, Dart Centre Europe for Journalism and Trauma.
Contact: mark.brayne@btinternet.com