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Mary Binks and Dean Yates

Dean Yates and Mary Binks talk about their experience coping with his PTSD

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Dean Yates is the author of Line in the Sand, a memoir published in June that has been acclaimed by mental health experts, journalists and authors from around the world. Dean was brought to the brink of suicide by extreme workplace trauma but recovered because of his strong drive to get better, the human connection of his loving family – especially his life partner Mary – and a mental health system that worked.

Clothilde Redfern

Dean and Mary will talk with Clothilde Redfern, director of the Rory Peck Trust, about how journalists and their loved ones can recognize PTSD in a family member. What are the signs? What as journalists can we learn from Dean’s experience?

The Rory Peck Trust is a UK Charity dedicated to the support, safety and welfare of journalists. In 2021 they launched a Resilience Program in response to the growing psychological challenges experienced by frontline journalists. Clothilde started her career in France working for the International Herald Tribune in Paris. After a year in Sydney working for Marie Claire Magazine, she moved to London in 2005 and joined the Media Trust’s production team, making documentaries for the Together Channel. She then spent four years at Channel 4 working in the Documentaries department.

Dean was a journalist and bureau chief for the international news agency Reuters for 26 years. He led teams of journalists that covered the Bali bombings, the Boxing Day tsunami in Indonesia’s Aceh province and the Iraq War. He was bureau chief in Iraq when a U.S. Apache gunship killed two Reuters journalists in Baghdad in 2007. Julian Assange later published footage of that attack, shocking millions of people. Dean’s last role at Reuters was to create and roll out a mental health strategy for the company’s 2,500 journalists from 2017-2020.

Mary Binks, Dean’s partner of 28 years, worked as a print, radio and television journalist in Australia and Asia for two decades. She won a Walkley Award, Australia’s highest journalism honor, for her coverage of Tasmania’s Forest Wars for a local newspaper. She reported on Hong Kong’s handover to China for TIME magazine in 1997 and was a roving TV producer for Reuters Television, covering the downfall of Indonesian President Suharto in 1998; international efforts to restore order to East Timor in 1999 as well as being the company’s first TV producer based in Hanoi since the end of the Vietnam War. Mary took 13 years off to raise their three children, then re-trained and returned to the workforce as a trauma counsellor to refugees and asylum seekers from war-torn parts of the world. She is currently a support worker at a homeless shelter.

Dean and Mary live in the village of Evandale in Tasmania.