Workshop for the Summit Mental Health in Journalism 

Bearing Witness for the Witnesses - Towards a trauma-restoring Media Culture
Journalists constantly report from traumatizing environments, yet media systems treat their experiences as a personal burden. To build stronger systems of care, we must shift to collective resonance. The workshop I envision introduces Global Social Witnessing (GSW) - an experiential practice to collectively attune to difficult events as a shared nervous system. Using co-regulation, embodied awareness, and collective sensemaking, reporters expand their capacity to hold distress without burnout. GSW senses into the pressures behind the headlines, empowering journalists to uphold emotionally intelligent, trauma-informed storytelling. This approach opens the space for contemplative compassion instead of emotional numbing, providing a practical approach to tell deeper truths and forge a trauma-restoring media culture.
The experiential workshop should directly target media workers facing the daily challenge of crisis reporting, while navigating an industry culture of mandated detachment. By adapting Global Social Witnessing for the journalism sector, the session should directly appeal to journalist's tension between professional objectivity and human empathy. It should encourage journalists to turn inwards, inquiring their experiences not as isolated individuals, but as a supportive collective, enabling them to report with greater integrity. ​

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