In his book-lined office in an old brick farmhouse in the main street of Evandale, light streaming in through a window, two greyhounds sprawled out at his feet, Dean Yates could not appear to be further removed from the world he writes about.
But occasionally it’s there, behind a beaming smile and no regrets, the weight he still carries.
The workplace mental health expert, public speaker and podcast host has raised his family in the idyllic village that became a salve for mental wounds incurred during an extraordinary career as a journalist and war correspondent, covering some of the biggest news stories of the past 30 years.
The Iraq War, the Bali bombings, the Boxing Day tsunami – the New South Wales lad ditched a comfortable career at financial firm KPMG and wound up working for Reuters, the biggest news agency in the world.
After joining Reuters in Jakarta, Dean moved to the company’s Asia headquarters in Hong Kong, in 1995, and there he met his wife-to-be, Mary Binks, a Tasmanian, an older and far more experienced journalist who had won a Walkley at The Advocate for her coverage of the forest wars.
Mary was working for Reuters Television, and constantly travelling on assignment, while Dean stayed relatively grounded.
“Of course, you know nothing about the trauma and how it’s going to affect you when you’re young,” Dean said.
“For instance we were living in Jerusalem at the end of 2006 and I was Deputy Bureau Chief for Israel and Palestine – and this is a big story with Israel’s war with Hezbollah – it was a job that I wanted and had been there barely a year when I got a phone call from one of the editors who said the Baghdad Bureau chief job was coming up, would I be interested in applying?
“At the time Iraq was slipping into civil war and Mary and I talked about it and the ultimate decision we came to was that yes, I would apply for it and I got the job.
“We never talked about the mental cost, not about the chance of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), or what impact being in Iraq might have on my mental health.
“We talked about the dangers to my staff, the pressure of getting the stories, and the potential of getting killed, but never once did we talk about the mental toll, and that was the state of journalism back then, it just wasn’t discussed.”
In Dean’s recently launched book Line in the Sand – A life-changing journey through a body and a mind after trauma, he reports the hardest story of all, his personal battle with mental illness and the affect it had on the ones he loved most.
It doesn’t’ matter if you don’t read war-related stuff or autobiographies, it doesn’t matter if you don’t have an interest in mental health or war veterans or politics or health policy – this is a page-turner, a love story and a valuable resource to help anyone, of any age, navigating the hardships of family life and any kind of adversity that seems insurmountable.
He puts mental health, press freedom and government accountability in the spotlight and he inspires with his honesty, self-compassion and determination to recover.
Dean points to the mis-matched framed photos around the shelves of the couple in Vietnam, Jerusalem, Cairo, Florence – two talented writers who travelled the globe together carrying a mental health grenade that didn’t go off until after they had adopted two children, and conceived another, and returned to Australia in 2013.
“All the classic signs of PTSD started to come out, the hypervigilance, the nightmares, the flashbacks, depression, emotional numbness to the family,” Dean said.
“It all started to pile on and in 2016, after being home for three years Mary said ‘you need help’. I was suicidal at this stage.
“That’s when I ended up in a psych ward in Melbourne. I wasn’t capable of making any decisions for myself so between my psychiatrist and Mary they got me into the best place in Australia to get the help I needed.”
Known as Ward 17, a specialist facility at Austin Health for war veterans and first responders, Dean found that he easy assimilated with soldiers, coppers, ambos, “because all the symptoms were the same”.
One of the key incidents that triggered Dean’s PTSD is covered in the opening pages of Line In The Sand – when his Iraqi staff Namir Noor-Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh were killed.
The details were eventually revealed in a WikiLeaks video called Collateral Murder.
At 10.19 am Namir and Saeed join a dozen men along a street where a flat-bed trailer and other vehicles are parked in an open square filled with rubbish. The Apache helicopters spot the group using powerful optics technology. An onboard camera records every step the men on the ground take. A few are carrying AK-47s and what looks like an RPG launcher, all pointed down. The men walk casually. Namir and Saeed are not wearing flak jackets with PRESS markings or protective helmets because al-Qaeda and other militant groups deliberately kidnap and kill journalists. Namir walks ahead with an unarmed man towards a walled compound on a street corner. The man gestures, like he wants to show Namir something.
Apaches resemble war machines from the Terminator movies. Just rotors and weapons. An M230 chain gun loaded with 30mm armour-piercing rounds swivels between the main landing gear. An Apache has a two-man crew, a pilot and gunner. ‘Hotel 2–6, Crazy Horse 1–8. Have five to six individuals with AK-47s. Request permission to engage,’ says the Crazy Horse 1–8 gunner in a matter-of-fact voice, using the call-sign of the infantry battalion below. ‘Roger that. Uh. We have no personnel east of our position. So, uh, you are free to engage, over,’ comes the reply. Engage means attack, kill.
Dean’s first admission was for five weeks, and then he ended up back there the following year, and the year after.
“Naively I thought that one admission would be enough but there was so much trauma to unpack and work through,” he admitted.
“Mary and I have had a rich and varied life – and it’s taken a mental toll on both of us in terms of what we have witnessed and what we experienced – but I’d do it all again because it was meaningful and interesting.”
“It’s been a privilege to do what I’ve been able to do, I’ve been lucky enough to witness some of the biggest world events of the last 25 years and have people open their doors and welcome me into their lives at times of great suffering, and great peril.