The Storm Inside

It’s April 2016, and I’m in London to edit a documentary. I’d just spent six weeks in Iraq, embedded with the country’s special forces as they battled for control of the largest province against the Islamic State. Now I’m standing in the lobby of the Ace Hotel in my underwear, surrounded by police. There’s a chair in my hands, and the smoke detector is giving me secret instructions to use it as a weapon. I feel adrenaline rush through my body as it had days earlier on the front line. Stepping forward, I swing the chair like a trapped animal. “Get down!” an officer screams. I can see the red dots of tasers swirling on my chest. Finally, I drop to my knees, and feel a pair of handcuffs close tight around my wrists, before I’m wrestled to the ground. I refuse to stand, so half a dozen officers lift and carry me into the back of a Metropolitan Police van. After twenty-four hours in a jail cell, drinking water out of a shit-stained toilet to quench my thirst, I’m taken to a mental hospital. 

It’s there that I first heard the term “bipolar 1”—a name for the storm inside me. For years, I’d known that something was not quite right. I experienced euphoria so intense that people around me thought that I was drunk or high, with wild benders to reinforce the point. Following each burst of mania would come crushing, lonely lows. I’d lie in the bath, my skin shriveled, my happiness drained away. Emotional extremes just seemed to be a part of who I was—feeling more vividly, living more intensely. Colleagues chalked it up to la vida pirata—the chaotic life of a freelance conflict journalist. 

It’s hard to pinpoint where personality ends and a disorder begins. I’ve been covering conflict as a freelance journalist since arriving in Iraq in 2009, at the age of twenty-four. The truth is I enjoy it. Maybe too much. It’s a dirty secret, but just as most soldiers want to see combat, so, too, do many journalists. I once went on an embed in Iraq where US troops were guarding an oil refinery—a frustrating and boring duty. “I just want to fucking shoot someone,” I overheard a soldier saying. And I wanted to photograph him shooting someone. Later that year, I did another embed in Afghanistan where the soldiers did shoot people, in active combat, and it was exhilarating. The deeper I went on the front line, the more horrific the story I documented, the more I loved my work—and the more successful I was professionally.

But now, sitting in a hospital in London, I found myself wondering how my mental condition fit into the world I’d inhabited for all those years. Had my diagnosis somehow made my choice of career inevitable? Or had my career choice accelerated my condition? And, above all, why had it taken so long for me, and those around me, to recognize what was really going on?

I was in front of my laptop when the first explosion tore through the air. It was 3:28pm on January 25, 2010, and I was in Baghdad. I jumped to my feet, grabbed my camera and raced toward the roof of the building I was in, to get a sense of where the explosion was. Another blast stopped me, three minutes later, before I eased my way out on top of the building. Bullets snapped through the air above my head—gunfire from the Hamra Hotel checkpoint across the street. I crouched low, expecting another explosion would come. They had hit the Hamra before, in 2005, luring people out with one bomb, then killing them with another. Boom. A third explosion shook the walls. I waited, breathing hard, then finally made my way down to the front door and crossed the street.

It was rush hour. The street was a mess of twisted metal, smoking cars, and debris. Blood spattered on car doors, and oranges lay scattered, blown from the branches of charred trees. People wandered through the chaos, crying, wounded, calling for help. Walking among the dazed survivors, I felt like a voyeur, a trauma tourist. I pulled out my camera and started shooting. I find purpose behind the lens. It shields me from the carnage—things feel more manageable when seen through a viewfinder. 

A young girl staggered forward, her face drenched in blood. I photographed her. She screamed and ran toward me, beating me with small exhausted fists until she collapsed, wailing. Someone told me that her mother had just been killed. For the first time in my young career, I recognized that some photos should not be taken. 

I sold the photos I took that day to the New York Times; they ran on the front page above the fold—my first internationally published work. But any elation at my success was short-lived. The bombing of the Hamra Hotel was a terroristic act of evil genius—it shattered the windows of the rooms of the journalists who lived there, and our sense of safety: they were watching us, scouting our homes and bureaus, assessing our security as we popped out to buy cigarettes.

I had come to Iraq because I was just starting my career, and someone advised me to go where there is the most news and the fewest journalists. Iraq seemed like a good choice. It was my father’s country. He left in the 1960s. I’d never set foot there and wanted to see it for myself. The Iraq I discovered looked very different from the one he left behind. IED craters on roads filled with trash. The skyline cut by concrete blast walls. Checkpoints with faded plastic flowers. Electricity poles sagging beneath webs of tangled bootleg wire. Sewage flowing through streets.

Most people think that being in a war zone is exciting. Really, it’s boring. Acute urgency enveloped by extended periods of inactivity. I came to identify with the black plastic bags I’d see everywhere, twisting in the wind on concertina wire, but never breaking free. I spent a lot of my time drinking warm Heineken and chain-smoking in front of a fan in an overpriced room.

Soon, I’d grow accustomed to the extreme fluctuations in mood that came with my chosen line of work. High from the success of an assignment, the adrenaline of combat, and the rush of meeting deadlines—followed by boredom and depression, and the self-medicating effects of drugs and alcohol, to hold onto that good feeling a bit longer.

When I was first hospitalized, my father told me an Arabic saying: li kul jawad kubwa—“every stallion has its fall.” I fell a lot over the years. (A colleague once described me as barreling through life, like a figure skater stumbling toward the ice.) I’d bounce from conflict to conflict, bender to bender, publication to publication. Success always rotated with failure. To make my own career last, I reinvented myself many times over: as a photojournalist, a videographer, a reporter, a correspondent, a broadcaster, a writer. My photographs regularly appeared on the front pages of the Times and other leading outlets. I had contracts with NPR and the BBC. I wrote for Foreign Policy, Newsweek. I made documentaries and news packages for the BBC and Vice News; at one point, I got a correspondent job at NBC.

I also had intense episodes, burning bridges with editors who thought that I was arrogant, an asshole, a drunk, a drug fiend, or all of the above—and they weren’t totally wrong. I coped with drugs and alcohol, but not much more than many of my colleagues. I would regularly fly to Beirut and Berlin to binge on alcohol and drugs with friends from the freelance tribe. Then there was the major-league mania. The greatest high of all. A rich intoxicating feeling of overwhelming confidence, superhuman vigor, and purpose. I didn’t question my mental state when I was manic. I just felt fantastic. Those around me thought I was using, with the Baghdad press corps trying to guess what drug I was on. But the high was natural, filling me with energy and an arrogant elevated sense of self. I called the photo editor at the New York Times “a fucking wanker” on Facebook, tagging everyone I knew in the industry. I told the foreign editor at the Times of London that I could do a better job of running News Corp and that they should take the paywall down.

Throughout this time, I often heard whispers among editors that I had developed post-traumatic stress disorder from covering too much violence. People expressed concern but didn’t make too much of it—and neither did I; in a professional culture that celebrates the wild men and women of the tribe, it was all just part of the job.

Bipolar disorder is a complex mental health condition, and its causes are not fully understood. Several factors are believed to contribute to its development, including genetic disposition, neurochemical imbalances, environmental stressors, sudden success or failure, bad or no meds, sleep deprivation, grief, and substance abuse. I’ve ticked all those boxes. 

Everyone experiences highs and lows, but manic-depressives ride a roller coaster of extremes far greater. Bipolar disorder, which affects about 1 percent of the global population, involves dramatic mood swings between euphoric, hyperactive mania and crushing, paralyzing depression. Most people are familiar with depression, but mania is harder to convey to someone who’s never experienced it. You feel invincible, certain, and untouchable. The need to keep moving, talking—doing something—is overwhelming. Sleep becomes irrelevant, and a sense of clarity, confidence, and creativity emerges that is so intoxicating that, if it were a drug, everyone would be addicted. It’s perhaps not surprising that some of history’s most notable figures—Winston Churchill, Vincent van Gogh, Virginia Woolf—are believed to have lived with bipolar disorder. It can also be dangerous: once, after a friend died, I left my home in Istanbul, walking barefoot, until I found myself ten miles away, unsure how I got there. 

Historically, bipolar disorder has often been underdiagnosed, particularly in its less obvious forms. As our understanding of mental health grew, the recognition of bipolar disorder as distinct from other mood disorders became clearer. Studies have shown that as many as 70 percent of people with bipolar were initially diagnosed with depression or another condition. 

For someone with a career like mine, it can be even harder to spot. Mental illness in journalism is often overlooked because the culture of boozing and rampant drug use is so widespread. In the world of TV news, for example, where budgets are bigger and the stakes higher, so is the pressure. Correspondents have to look good, think fast, and project confidence. Cocaine helps. It’s an expensive habit, but where the money flows, so does the blow.

But it didn’t help that, as a freelancer, I didn’t have the kind of workplace relationships that might have caught the trends earlier. When a staffer experiences a crisis, their news outlet is more likely to be accepting, even paying for therapy, treatment, or rehab. Freelancers, on the other hand, are on our own. When we break, we are often discarded.

Many journalists I know have experienced a mental health crisis or struggles with addiction. Few come clean about it willingly with their employers, fearing the stigma—especially the freelancers. I recently stayed with a freelance friend, a prize-winning conflict reporter, who confided in me that he went to rehab for cocaine addiction and was seeing a psychiatrist. When I asked him whether he’d discussed his challenges with his primary client, he said, “Fuck no! That would be the end of my career.”

Local freelance producers, or “fixers,” suffer the most acutely. I know a Middle Eastern fixer who found herself in an abusive relationship with a Western journalist that left her battling insomnia, panic attacks, and nightmares so vivid she would wake up terrified. To cope, she pushed her body to the brink, working out until she retched, but that wasn’t enough. When she reported the abuse to the Western journalist’s employer, they took action against the journalist, but she says she was offered no counseling or support. She was left to pick up the pieces alone. When she speaks of the journalism industry, she describes a system that enabled a predator and abandoned her when she needed it most.

In an industry that thrives on constant pressure, mental health struggles, in all their forms, are poorly acknowledged. Many struggle in secret for fear of being outcast. Even though the work—long hours, exposure to trauma, relentless deadlines—is intricately connected to our well-being. 

After my chair-swinging meltdown, I spent a week in a psychiatric ward, then went straight back to the office, still manic. I tried hiding my condition, but I wasn’t ready to work. I’d already racked up thousands in hotel damages, but the real cost was to my career. Tense and irritable, I clashed with my editor. That was the end of that professional relationship. If I’d been physically wounded, I would’ve been taken care of. Instead, I became just another discarded freelancer. No compensation, no support. Just a broken toy.

My diagnosis with bipolar 1 did eventually help me, though. It gave a name to the chaos and a path to treatment. It also allowed me to recognize how much pain I’d caused myself and others trying to pretend nothing was wrong, by internalizing the idea that I was disposable. Like most journalists with mental health issues, I have only ever wanted to keep working, even if it meant hiding who I was from editors, and walking away from contracts and professional relationships if I was perceived as too difficult to work with.

Even now, as I write this, I can’t shake the fear that it might end my career. But I have to say it out loud and to speak up for the many other journalists I know who cannot. Mental illness runs deep through our profession. There are many journalists hiding from the stigma of mental health, addiction, or both, trying not to appear as damaged goods and to keep on working. I want them to know that they are not alone.