Humanities Studios: Pedagogy, Psychology, Philosophy

The fifth year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine presented journalists with existential challenges that go beyond the classical clinical and psychological models: media professionals balanced daily between fixing human suffering and preserving their own personal integrity. Existing research has focused primarily on the pathological consequences of traumatic exposure, whilst the existential dimension – the survivor’s experience of meaning, responsibility, guilt, and a transformed worldview – has remained systematically under-investigated. The purpose of the study was to theoretically substantiate the existential dimension of journalistic activity in the context of armed conflict by comparing philosophical concepts of evidence with empirical data on the psychological state of media workers. The study had a theoretical design and was implemented through critical analysis and conceptual synthesis of peer-reviewed scientific sources from the Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed databases, and key monographs on existential psychology and the philosophy of evidence. It has been established that the experience of the journalist-witness brings to the fore four existential modalities: the confrontation with death as an everyday reality of the profession, which shatters the illusion of own invulnerability; the survivor’s guilt associated with the inability to help those about whom one reports; a crisis of meaning caused by doubt regarding the impact of the journalistic mission; and the forced solitude of the witness, who finds it difficult to convey their experiences to people outside their professional circle. It was shown that post-traumatic growth in journalists has a pronounced existential character: the domains “spiritual development” and “increasing the value of life” are most often updated under the condition of personal risk. Longitudinal data from the Institute of Mass Information for 2022-2025 confirmed the proposed model: the shift from acute mobilisation through exhaustion to pragmatic adaptation reproduces the existential dialectic of destruction and reconstruction of meaning. The results substantiated the need to supplement clinical interventions with existential-oriented approaches, in particular, logotherapy techniques and structured reflection of the witness mission, in programmes of psychological support for journalists

existential psychology; evidence; sensationalism; survivor’s guilt; post-traumatic growth; professional identity; journalists in armed conflict