Surviving Trauma

2019 Johns Hopkins-Pulitzer Center Symposium

ISIS child soldiers. Families separated at the U.S.–Mexico border. Victims of sexual violence in Africa.

Across the globe, survivors of traumatic events endure devastating psychological effects—often without access to mental health services.

At the seventh annual Johns Hopkins-Pulitzer Symposium, Bloomberg School faculty and award-winning journalists from the Pulitzer Center shared their findings from trauma’s frontlines and explored ways to heal its wounds.

SPEAKERS

• Kimberly Dozier, MA, is a CNN Global Affairs Analyst, who writes for TIME and The Daily Beast. Past posts include AP Intelligence Writer, BBC World Service anchor, and 17 years as an award-winning CBS Evening News foreign and national security correspondent. Dozier was the first woman, and first journalist appointed General Omar Bradley Chair at the U.S. Army War College. She covered the Iraq war for CBS News from 2003 to 2006, when her news team was hit by a car bomb. She recounts the attack and recovery in her best-selling memoir, Breathing the Fire: Fighting to Survive and Get Back to the Fight.

• Laura Murray, PhD, MA, is a senior scientist in the Bloomberg School’s Department of Mental Health and core faculty in the School’s Center for Humanitarian Health, with a research focus on developing, testing, and implementing evidence-based mental health treatments in low-resource countries. Trained as a clinical psychologist, she has led research in Zambia on developing effective and scalable treatments for a range of mental health issues, including trauma, depression, anxiety, and alcohol misuse. Other research has addressed treating child victims of child sexual abuse and children exposed to violence.

• Pat Nabong, MA, is a freelance visual journalist based in Chicago and a Pulitzer Center grantee. Her Pulitzer project explores the psychological toll of President Rodrigo Duterte’s extrajudicial drug war in the Philippines, which has killed more than 7,000 people—mostly small-time drug dealers and addicts from low-income communities. Nabong’s work, which includes the documentary Alone in the Aftermath, addresses the mental health problems of survivors and the barriers to mental health care. Her social justice journalism includes stories on the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota and displaced indigenous people in the southern Philippines.

• Paul Spiegel, MD, MPH, is director of the Bloomberg School’s Center for Humanitarian Health and Professor of the Practice in the School’s Department of International Health. He is recognized internationally for his research on preventing and responding to complex humanitarian emergencies. Previously he served as deputy director of the Division of Programme Management and Support Services for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, medical epidemiologist in the International Emergency and Refugee Health Branch at the CDC, medical coordinator with Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde in refugee emergencies, and as an expert consultant.

HOST AND MODERATOR

• Judy Bass, PhD, MPH, is an associate professor of Global Mental Health in the Bloomberg School's Department of Mental Health. Trained in economic development and psychiatric epidemiology, her interests are in the interconnectedness of mental and economic well-being, with the goal of understanding how programs in each domain can be integrated to improve mental health and well-being among populations living with violence and adversity. She has led multiple trials of task-sharing interventions, including a seminal trial of community-based therapy for sexual violence survivors in the DRC, and is involved in training and growing the field of global mental health researchers.