Studies Say that News Watching Can Cause War Trauma

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(Image source: cihrs.org)


War trauma is not limited to the places where a war is raging. It permeates globally, especially through media outlets, and it has dangerous physical and psychological consequences for all of us. 


Studies say that we do not need to live in a conflict zone to experience war trauma. War news travels at high speed and scale and reaches us within moments of the real happenings. We all experience war in real time. 


The sights and sounds of war, recorded and telecast in high quality, strike the viewer with unprecedented severity. Every listener or viewer of mass media becomes an indirect victim of war. 


The people in the Middle East or the neighbouring countries of Ukraine and Russia live under the constant fear of the war spilling over to their localities. However, a television viewer in the US, India, or Japan might feel a surge of high anxiety just by continuously watching the news about these distant wars.    


Sometimes, an individual living in a war zone might be exposed to the violence and fear of the war only in a limited sense because his or her location may still be away from the exact places where intense fighting happens. Other terrible aspects of war could be happening, but not at the moment, not in their place.


The people who watch war news have no hope for such protection, however fragile it may be, as they are constantly bombarded with news of deaths, destruction, and accompanying horrible sights and sounds. The entire darkness of the war is forced upon them every moment they watch the news. 


Our drawing rooms, bedrooms, workspaces, and public places have television and internet access. Mobile phones ping us a hundred times daily as news updates and changes. We are surrounded 24/7 by news. 


The Ukraine-Russia war and the Israel-Gaza war have brought war news to the top headline position. The result is that we are immersed around the clock in the horrors of war. It is like a new pandemic, a virus, eating away our brains, our peace of mind, and our hopes for a better world. In other words, a psychological pandemic is hovering above us. 


Not many studies have probed how war trauma affects media users. A few studies have investigated the psychological impact of the news of COVID-19 during the pandemic. 


The international psychology manual, DSM-5, has included indirect exposure to trauma as a cause of PTSD. DSM-5 mentions only indirect exposure and does not specifically include news watching. 


Information overload has always been a problem for all of us. News about the pandemic and war adds a new dangerous dimension to it by being solely about death, destruction, and loss. 


In 2013, the effect of the live coverage of the Twin Tower attack in the US was one of the first instances when the psychological impact of news watching was studied. The study also covered the watching of news on the Iraq war. It concluded that in both cases, the news coverage caused increased PTSD among the news watchers. 


Another study in 2022 investigated how the people of Germany, Great Britain, Poland and the US reacted emotionally to the war in Ukraine. The participants were found to have increased levels of anxiety and anger.   


COVID-19 news-induced PTSD was recorded in several studies. An interesting study published by Social Science & Medicine Journal had its participants chosen from Israeli ex-prisoners of war. It was found that they were more prone to excessive news watching and related PTSD than the control group during the COVID-19 pandemic. 


802 Jewish adult Israelis participated in a recent study held in 2024 to assess how the 24/7 news coverage of war impacts them. 70% of the respondents reported being stressed watching the war news. More disconcerting is the result that 24% of the participants found war news addictive, causing stress and the fear of missing out (FOMO). 


A sample group of people who were indirectly exposed to the October 7 Hamas attack in Israel were studied by —in 2024. The inferences were alarming-


  1. 22-35 per cent of those who were indirectly exposed to mass media reporting the incident had PTSD.

  2. Those who were indirectly exposed to mass media developed sleep disorders. 

  3. Those who were indirectly exposed to mass media had higher stress levels.   


There are no similar studies to be found on the Internet from the Arab world, though the people there might be one of the most prone to war news-watching related PTSD.  


Media-watching-induced PTSD may soon find a place in the international psychology manual. War news most probably would be the immediate reason for this inclusion. 


In the meantime, we have two impossible choices before us- either develop disinterest in what happens in the world and to those who live in conflict zones and grow unempathetic and selfish or be ready to be enervated by war news again and again and contract PTSD out of it. 


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