Stress led to Lloyd drugs charge

ABC Journalist Peter Lloyd, who faces charges of drug possession and consumption in Singapore has spoken of the stresses of work which he says contributed to him seeking a way out.

Admitting he thought he was merely tired from the pressure of being a foreign correspondent, Lloyd has been diagnosed with work-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“In the last six years I have done more mass-casualty stuff than your average soldier does. As first responders (like police, paramedics and firefighters), I don’t think my generation of journalists overseas has done the kind of stuff we’ve seen” in that time,” he says.

According to The Age, Lloyd recalls, at most, two perfunctory, meaningless, “tick-the-box” calls from a junior psychologist after Bali or the tsunami, inquiring about his sleeping, eating and moods. Personal inquiries by two senior colleagues in Sydney were too soon after the events, as PTSD — the official term since 1980 for what was once called war neurosis or shell shock — emerges as a delayed reaction. It was only after intensive, face-to-face counselling sessions after his arrest and hospitalisation for a breakdown that he deconstructed his time overseas, and recalled feeling overwhelmed and abandoned without back-up in the first fortnight after the tsunami hit.

His ex-wife Kirsty McIvor said, “We left Australia a happy family … and within a year or two, Peter had covered some of the worst terrorist and natural disasters in decades. He did this alone with no psychological support or counselling. I know for a fact that it affected him and he changed.”

Lloyd split from his wife after coming out as a gay man.

Kimina Lyall, South-East Asia correspondent for The Australian recalls Lloyd’s successive 20-hour days during the tsunami, and wondering how people continually operated under such stress.

“Whereas I generally had one deadline a day, Peter would have three or four major ones and then be constantly taking calls from dozens of ABC local radio stations wanting to do live crosses with him.”

Lloyd’s psychiatrist, Dr Ang Yong Guan says, “Out of desperation, he (Lloyd) was hoping ice could relieve him of his persistent nightmares, dreams and intrusive thoughts and disassociative states.”

Lloyd acknowledges that for a savvy, worldly reporter of 41, he did not link his growing confusion, sleeplessness, nightmares and wish that every plane he caught would crash with his work experiences. He just thought he was tired.

“PTSD is like mental cancer. You don’t know you have cancer until it’s diagnosed, and it’s the same with PTSD.

“It will always bother me that I wasn’t able to act on an awareness that I wasn’t well,” he says of his “zombie” state this year.

Lloyd says does not blame the ABC for his plight but says the job and its stresses, coupled with an isolated post in Delhi, was why he sought “a one-off personal use self-medication consumption, unfortunately in Singapore”, which has tough drug laws.

A plea bargain on the remaining possession and consumption charges remains to be negotiated before his sentence next month.

Source: The Age