Hours after submitting to my editor my draft of a long, reported magazine feature about my alma mater’s campus rape problem, I woke up screaming from a horrifying dream about being drugged and raped. I’m not a survivor of sexual assault, but I write about it often, and this article was more than six months in the making. The accounts I’d heard had lodged themselves into my subconscious. Now, they were making their presence known, and brutally so. I barely slept for the next three nights, afraid that if I did, I’d return to that terrible nightmare.

Many journalists experience similar symptoms after witnessing horrific trauma, becoming traumatized themselves. In her new book Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story, human rights reporter Mac McClelland wrote about how her reporting on sexual violence in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake left her emotionally and psychologically shattered. The trauma of finding and telling stories about the worst things that can happen to human beings was cumulative; though witnessing sexual violence in Haiti was what triggered her PTSD, she had spent months reporting on human suffering, and often, doing that work put her in harm’s way. Before Haiti, she had reported on the human impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, writing about the misery of fishermen and their families as their livelihoods evaporated; before that, she wrote about vigilante justice on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma, where a group of her sources joked openly about raping her. After a while, doing her job left her unable to do her job.

The emotional response McClelland describes flies in the face of the traditional image of the objective and impartial reporter, one to which our culture irrationally clings. To admit that your work affects you and that the facts you report keep you up at night can endanger your credibility as a journalist. For women in particular, it layers a feminine stereotype over the already difficult struggle to be taken seriously as a journalist, something that war photojournalist Lynsey Addario tackles in her new memoir It’s What I Do. Recounting an incident in which she and three other journalists drove into the Libyan city of Adjdabiya during that country’s civil war in 2011, Addario writes that she was anxious and frightened, but that she kept her feelings to herself. "I didn’t want to be the cowardly photographer or the terrified girl who prevented the men from doing their work,” she wrote. Lauren Wolfe, who covers sexual violence in conflict zones for Women Under Siege and sat on the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) for five years, says that the question of how covering trauma affects journalists was rarely brought up during her time there. "It’s a conversation that no one is willing to have," she says. The CPJ’s Journalist Security Guide now includes a short entry on "stress reactions."

Wolfe was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of her work, and though she says she isn’t ashamed to talk about it on the record, "part of my stomach clenches before I answer." Her tone part defiant, part matter-of-fact, she asks, rhetorically, "Why should I be ashamed by being affected by terrible things? It’s natural, and by recognizing it, you can deal with it and move on."

Women journalists are not the only ones whose work leaves them depressed, anxious, outraged, or traumatized. Guardian reporter Oliver Laughland has reported extensively on Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers, which the United Nations has found to be in violation of the Convention Against Torture. Laughland recalls seeing some of the first images of a riot at the Manus Island Detention Centre in Papua New Guinea early last year, when one asylum seeker was killed and about 70 were injured. "It was a complete war zone," Laughland says, with "people coming in with gunshot wounds, people who’d been clocked over the head with rocks, and it’s something you just can’t get out of your head." Those images, Laughland says, don’t go away when you shut your eyes, and sometimes, he says, they haunt him.