Dean Yates

Dean Yates is the author of Line in the Sand, a memoir published in June 2023 that has been acclaimed by mental health and moral injury experts around the world. Dean was a longtime journalist and bureau chief for the international news agency Reuters. He covered some of the most traumatic events of the past 25 years, leading 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. Dean is currently a peer worker (part-time) at the Head to Health mental health clinic in Launceston, a workplace mental health trainer and a public speaker.

Praise for Line in the Sand: “Dean Yates bares his still healing heart and the depths of his humanity by providing a raw and utterly unguarded first-person account of the horrific losses and moral injuries he incurred … He reveals an essential truth about recovery from trauma and moral injury, namely that it is a lifelong challenge, and it is never one thing, like good psychotherapy”. Professor Brett Litz, co-author of Adaptive Disclosure: A New Treatment for Military Trauma, Loss, and Moral Injury.