Living with PTSD: A reporter's story after Itaewon Episode 2: Suffocating in the silence of my own denial To Readers Note: The story centers on the Itaewon disaster, which occurred on Oct. 29, 2022. Reliving the moment Hiding the medication I was not alone From denying to accepting myself Healing starts with acceptance This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.

As a reporter on the social affairs desk, I covered the Itaewon disaster on Oct. 29, 2022. Since November of the following year, I have been receiving treatment regularly. I attend psychiatric counseling sessions and take medication every day. *The series is based on the real-life experience of Kim Nam-young, a JoongAng Ilbo reporter currently living with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The following articles are written from Kim's first-person perspective. I have PTSD. Itaewon is a well-known nightlife district in Yongsan District, central Seoul, and a popular spot for Halloween celebrations because of its diverse international culture. The disaster occurred during the first Halloween season after social distancing restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic had been lifted. Large crowds gathered in the area to celebrate. As more and more people poured into the neighborhood, the crowd became dangerously packed. The situation eventually led to a crowd crush in a narrow alley, amid a lack of effective crowd-control measures, leaving some 350 people dead or injured, including 159 fatalities. As a reporter on the social affairs desk, I covered the Itaewon disaster on Oct. 29, 2022. Since November of the following year, I have been receiving treatment regularly. I attend psychiatric counseling sessions and take medication every day. I am only revealing the illness now, more than two years later, not because I have overcome it. This is not a story about recovery, but a record of living through the illness. To be honest, I still do not know when, or if, I will overcome it. Instead, I want to talk about the time I have spent living alongside PTSD. Even now, I continue to work as a policy and social affairs reporter while exercising, traveling and going on with daily life. If someone is hesitant to see a doctor, I hope this piece helps. I also hope we can become a society where people do not feel forced to hide emotional pain and trauma. It began around October 2023, as the first anniversary of the Itaewon crowd crush approached. Lost shoes piled along the side of the street, emergency responders pressing hard against the chests of people who had stopped breathing — These scenes would suddenly flash vividly into my mind even while walking down the street. When I woke from nightmares, my heart would race. I began consciously avoiding related articles and even certain words. However, still, waves of nausea came over me, and I was always on edge for no apparent reason. Saying I was "having a hard time" did not come close to describing it. A doctor later told me these were classic symptoms of PTSD. The things I had dismissed as simple oversensitivity were, in fact, cries of pain. PTSD is not a memory that naturally fades with time. It is an illness in which the brain forces a person to relive past threats as if they are happening in the present. That is why scenes suddenly resurface, and the body reacts first. Eventually, I had no choice but to begin treatment and start taking medication. But there was something even harder to bear than the illness itself — It was accepting that I was someone receiving treatment. After beginning PTSD treatment, I developed a new habit. Whenever I visited my hometown, which is in the countryside outside of Seoul, or traveled with friends, I packed a small opaque pouch with one purpose and one purpose only: to hold my psychiatric medication. Before going to sleep, I would secretly take my pills in the bathroom and swallow them with water. In the mornings, I woke earlier than everyone else to take them. I always put the pill packets back into the pouch afterward. If someone had asked what they were, I thought that I could probably brush them off as cold medicine. To be quite frank, I know that nobody would have even cared. Even so, I desperately wanted to hide the fact that I was seeing a psychiatrist. The packets had no names on them. They were transparently wrapped. Yet I was terrified s...