By Victoria Walton, J Source

A year after covering a massacre, 13 months of a pandemic and managing the uncertainty around employment in the field has taken a toll, one I didn’t know I had signed up for as a local news reporter

In journalism school, I wrote my honours project on mental health effects on war correspondents. I remember learning about vicarious trauma — the idea that you can be affected severely, deeply, by something that didn’t really happen to you.

But it still has taken me almost a year of covering the Nova Scotia shooting, the pandemic, the tragedies that have arisen from both, to consider how vicarious trauma might affect my life and my career as a journalist.

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