Addressing journalists’ mental wellbeing: Setting peer support in newsrooms

Charlotte Pion: What does it mean to be a Mental Wellbeing Champion?

Dave Seglins: Back in 2021, I proposed a job that was focused on mental health within the newsroom at CBC. At that moment we did not know what the job was going to be, but I knew it was going to involve advocating for change in the way we did things. As such, I came up with the name after seeing it in other contexts, and thought “what about a Mental Wellbeing Champion?”. It’s a little cheeky and surprises people, it makes them think, which is the whole point, to make people think in new ways. The job has come to involve everything from teaching and training to creating programs of peer support and encouraging new ways of doing assignments that involve trauma. So, it’s kind of a ‘catch all phrase’, but it was it was designed to be a little cheeky to make people smile, I hope, and think differently.

Read more: MediaStrong 2025: Building healthier newsrooms

CP: How do you see peer support evolving since you started the initiative at CBC/Radio-Canada?

DS: My own view years ago is peer support. Who needs that, right? I would have never thought of it as being, “oh, colleagues helping colleagues.” But as I look around and think of the things that I really enjoy within journalism, it’s teamwork, it’s collaboration. When you’re working on tough stories or you’re working on 12, 14, 18 hour days, it’s debriefing, it’s spending time afterwards, celebrating the good work that you’ve done or commiserating over the difficulty of the work with colleagues. That really kind of brings me joy.

When I started this work on mental health I learned about formal peer support, where news organizations are building organizational programs where they train people and have a system of oversight and are advertising it through a website internally, for peers that people can go to if you’ve got a problem with work-related stress or burnout or trauma. The idea intrigued me, but I didn’t think of myself as somebody who would be doing this kind of work.

Flash forward two and a half, three years since we launched, it’s been highly successful, and it only improves the culture, collegiality within a news organization.

CP: How do you implement it? What are the steps you took to implement peer support in the newsroom you work in?

DS: First of all, I sought out the help of peers in the industry. Meaning, I went to Reuters, I went to NPR, I went to the BBC. I said, “What do you do for peer support?” And they described their models.

I drafted a proposal to my bosses because it was going to take some money, because the form of peer support that we decided on was going to start with a pilot. So you’re not promising the world of, you know, hundreds of peer supporters for a large organisation to start off. We started with 20 peer supporters, but it was going to require some training, professional training from companies that work with news organisations, understand providing counselling services to news organisations, but also understand how to set up peer support. So, we needed the money to hire them to consult on how this was going to work, to deliver training. We put out a call for volunteers, and I was incredibly encouraged when we  saw we had over 50 applications for the 20 advertised positions.

Number one, the interest was there and then we had really high-quality candidates, people who’ve done a lot of thinking. It turns out in large organisations there are a lot of people who’ve been already thinking about mental health or have their own journeys that they can bring that wisdom to the job of peer support. So, we had an application process, we reviewed them, and we wanted to make sure that we weren’t only picking people from the large cities. We needed coverage from coast to coast in Canada. We also wanted to make sure we had a fair representation among gender, among races. We have some French-speaking colleagues as we are CBC/Radio Canada, which is a bilingual organization. So how are we going to structure that?

There’s a great community out there that are making this happen, but it’s going to take future leaders and people to take the initiative and take the first steps.

We had to select applicants carefully. We trained those people. And then we held a big launch, where we had our editor-in-chief introduce this new service.

It’s everything from the conceptual stages to fundraising to recruitment, training, promotion, and now we’re in a period of running it. In fact, we’ve now trained up four additional cohorts. We have more than 70 peer supporters within our network.

Now, as far as it’s running, every three months we get together online with the company that does some of the oversight where we have professional development. We talk about how things are going, what the main issues going forward, how we can improve our outreach.

CP: What have you learned from others speaking of their own peer support initiatives?  

DS: What we learn from our colleagues who are doing peer support, is how important it is to look at how are they doing this in other industries. How are they doing it within healthcare? How are they doing this within policing? A colleague from the BBC that has helped set up a program that has over 300 peer supporters told us that every organization will be different. But at the core of peer support is this idea of colleagues helping colleagues, whether it’s a formal network of trained peers, whether it’s an informal drop-in Zoom call. And that is essentially peer support. Although they probably wouldn’t describe it as that. But it’s an opportunity to get together to hash out and discuss and commiserate over problems within the industry.

Peer support can be tailored to all kinds of environments. In addition, one of the things is it doesn’t have to be within a single news organization. We’re experimenting in Canada with a cross-industry peer support. It’s a pilot phase, but it’s under the umbrella of the Canadian Association of Journalists.

It’s all volunteer. We’ve got 20 peer supporters in place, and this is now available to all sorts of employees, media workers, freelancers who don’t have a large organization to turn to.

So, it’s a kind of a sector-by-sector approach.

CP: What are the challenges to setting up this peer support network?

One of the key challenges is finding money to allocate not just to mental health training and programs, but to peer support in particular, because if you’re going to set up a formal peer support network, you should get some help,  from people who understand what kind of training needs to be done, from people who understand the journalism sector, but also understand how to deliver the peer support.

It’s also true that somebody said something to me when they set up their program, they said, “you will build it and they will not come, not at first.”

So, convincing your bosses to spend thousands of dollars on training, and then you’ve got a network that only gets a few calls, is that success or failure?

What we’ve decided is we kept at it, we grew, and we continued promotions. And over time, we’ve now had hundreds of people use it. So that is success, but you’ve got to stick with it because culturally, if you’re bringing in something new on mental health in a workplace, there will be scepticism and resistance.

People may not turn to it initially, but then word starts to get around and it becomes normal. And more and more people are in the network and more and more kinds of people are reflected in who is taking part, who is a peer supporter.

It can start to serve a community at large much better.

CP: Have you observed a change in the mentalities of the people in the profession in terms of admitting the toll the job can have on their wellbeing and the need to address it?

DS: There is this tendency within journalism where we’re not part of the story, so we don’t talk about ourselves in our editorial product. But I actually don’t believe that we don’t talk about how we’re doing. I think we have all sorts of ways that, although we don’t go into a newsroom and announce “I’m having a really bad mental health day”, journalists set up their own coping mechanisms.

What do people do when they’re stressed out? They complain, they turn negative, they have a dark sense of humour. They do talk to each other, you know, when they go for coffee or a smoke break or go for a beer.

There are all kinds of peer support baked into the way we do jobs, but I think there’s not enough. And I think that when people finally find a colleague that they can talk to, I think it’s so welcomed. There is a cultural shift going on in the news industry around acknowledgement and making it safe and okay to talk about mental health. And I think that talking to a colleague is non-threatening. It doesn’t put you at risk that your manager is going to think less of you or that somehow, you’re weak or that you’re not up to the next tough assignment.

And it’s also not as time or financially consuming going out and getting formal counselling, let’s say, from a psychotherapist. So, it fills a gap. It’s not what’s needed for everybody, but I think it’s a really valuable space that can be filled.

CP: Looking back at all the work you have done, what is your reflection on what has been accomplished and what can still be done?

I never thought I would be an advocate for peer support. It kind of came out of a place of necessity for me to do something positive in my workplace that could help foster better discussions and better support around mental health.

And one thing I would like to say is that this doesn’t come out of nowhere. The companies, generally speaking, aren’t going to start them just to be good citizens. It takes people from the front lines to get involved and get active and take initiative and I would encourage anyone who’s sort of listening to this thinking of how could this work in their workplace to reach out. There are lots of people who work in this space and other news organizations that are experimenting with peer support. There’s a great community out there that are making this happen, but it’s going to take future leaders and people to take the initiative and take the first steps.