AFCN organized a closed “Mental health support” session to its community
January 29, 2025
In its first virtual meeting dedicated for its community in 2025, the Arab Fact Checkers Network (AFCN) from ARIJ, has held a closed session entitled “AFCN Community: “Let’s Care for Our Mental Health,” in order to give our mental health the top priority, especially with the continuous difficult situations in the region. From wars and crises, the AFCN fact-checkers community stand on the front lines facing streams of misinformation and disinformation, which contain among their folds shocking and painful scenes.
AFCN manager, Saja Mortada, led the session, which was held virtually on Wednesday, January 29, 2025, for two hours, and was attended by 21 fact checkers from the AFCN community from 11 Arab countries.
The session began with a general overview of the types of psychological pressures that we face in usual daily life, then the trainer gave the participants the opportunity to speak about their current mental conditions and feeling. She then moved on to focus on methods that help relieve psychological pressures, sharing some effective exercises for mental support.
The session provided a safe space for fact-checkers of the AFCN community, through which they shared their own experiences in dealing with psychological stressors. The discussion that was raised during the session between the participants, also had a clear impact that highlights the importance of these sessions, which confirms the role of the network community being as a single unit, that constantly cooperates and collaborates with everyone to overcome challenges and address them.
Yasmine Dakhli from the Tunifact fact-checking organization from Tunisia confirms that the session “was of great benefit as personal experiences were shared from the lives of each fact checker, away from normal work discussions, as it was a comfortable and safe space for discussion. I suggest that AFCN have more similar discussion sessions and that they provide more individual clinics with specialists in the field.”
Abdul Rahman Rabie from Yemen, a freelance Fact-checker and part on the AFCN chatbot team, highlighted that “Fact Checkers are constantly exposed to painful and shocking content that they receive while verifying videos content coming from various conflict countries in the MENA region and this requires psychological safety sessions and specialized clinics to help protecting themselves.”
This session comes as a part of the continuous efforts of the ARIJ’s AFCN, to support fact-checkers in the Arab world in the field of mental health, which was preceded by intensive psychological safety sessions and clinics delivered by specialists during the years 2023-2024.
