PTSD researchers say media reporting on shark and animal attacks must change to avoid victim blaming
Paz Moreno was thankful to survive after being bitten by a venomous blue-ringed octopus, but the victim blaming that followed compounded her mental anguish. It's a phenomenon that other animal attack survivors know all too well.
Paz Moreno hesitantly takes a step towards the water's edge at Chinamans Beach.
Located in the affluent suburb of Mosman on the shores of Sydney Harbour, there's little to be afraid of — the waves are small and avoidable, the turquoise depths nicely buffered by a comfortable stretch of sandy shore to safely plant your feet.
Loading...This was once one of Paz's favourite places to swim.
When she first moved to Australia from Chile in 2018, Paz quickly and eagerly adapted to Australia's beach lifestyle.
"Here, you use the beach as a part of your life every day … I see people go to the beach in the winter … there's no problem with that — it's just routine," she says.
"In Chile, it's not so common to be in touch with ocean life."
Despite this, she developed a reverence for the octopus — pulpo, in Spanish — from a young age.
"I felt very … not scared … but, 'Oh we have to be careful with these animals', more than sharks or other kinds of creatures, because they are very intelligent," Paz says.
For this reason, she "never wanted to have an encounter with an octopus".
Loading...Paz stands hand-in-hand with her partner Mauricio Quilpatay, their feet buried in the sand, ankle deep.
She dreams of going further — back into the water.
"I feel it will be soon. A moment in my life that I will return, but I don't think it will be like it used to," Paz says.
"The ocean is so huge. It's a fantasy that we are in control."
One, two, three pinches
In March 2023, just as the summer heat was fading, Paz decided to take a quick dip at Chinaman's Beach with Mauricio, right before she taught her usual Thursday Spanish class.
She zipped up her swimsuit, adjusted her snorkel and entered the glittery blue water.
"I submerged, and I saw a shell. I picked it up and returned to the surface to look at it," she says.
"I checked the shell because the shells can have a crab in it or a snail."
It was seemingly empty, so Paz placed the shell in the pocket of her swimsuit, and continued swimming.
The first pinch came when she began to leave the water.
"It wasn't painful but was kind of annoying."
A second pinch.
Paz checked her swimsuit and saw nothing.
A third pinch.
She noticed a lump protruding underneath her swimsuit. She held the lump and unzipped for another check.
There was the octopus, "with the full bright blue lines".
Paz was aware it was a blue-ringed octopus, as she'd recently watched a TikTok video about the dangerous animal, "so it was pretty fresh".
Mauricio quickly leapt into action.
"She turned towards me and said take it off. I didn't think about it, I just followed instructions," he says.
Mauricio grabbed what he described as a "spherical blob of bright yellow and blue" in his fingertips, flicked it to the sand and dialled triple-0.
The couple then managed to contain the octopus in a bottle with some water as they waited for the ambulance.
The creature had turned brown with the sun and sand, and Paz was hopeful that, maybe, it wasn't what she thought it was.
But when the ambulance arrived, a paramedic flicked the bottle and the octopus once again flashed blue.
This was an emergency.
Call your family
Warning: This section contains imagery of spiders
Soon after the ambulance arrived, Paz began to feel a numbness around her mouth and tongue.
"Like when you eat spicy food but without the spicy feeling."
In the back of the ambulance, she was told to call her family.
"I think that was a big red flag for me," Paz says.
"I wasn't afraid, I think I had disassociated. I was being very rational about it."
Loading...In hospital, her respiratory strength, blood pressure and heart rate were decreasing, but overall, she was feeling OK.
Being accompanied by the octopus, nicknamed Cuddles by hospital staff, made Paz something of a fascination during her stay.
"So many people came to visit and take selfies with the octopus. I think that was the weirdest part."
But it isn't surprising.
The blue-ringed octopus is one of the many dangerous animals Australians grow up fearing. Thankfully, however, very few of us ever interact with one.
When Paz and Mauricio first told their families of their plans to move to Australia, their loved ones were "terrified" for them, over potential encounters with spiders and sharks.
Paz reassured them, saying "no worries, I am not going to Queensland" — a place she thought of as home to a disproportionate number of the country's dangerous animals.
Loading...Paz's apartment is decorated with photos of her travels around the world with Mauricio, and their cat Uli, who continues to be a great comfort to her following the octopus encounter.
Finding herself belly to beak with one of Australia's most infamous critters still feels hard to believe, but she says it was what happened after the accident that surprised her the most.
In the aftermath, she says two things surprised her: the media's response, and the post-traumatic stress she now experiences, which has prevented her from making a swift return to the ocean, and left her with a disgust for soft, fishy textures.
"I was a big fan of ceviche, so when I visited Chile a couple of months ago my family were waiting with a big pot."
But Paz couldn't indulge.
News of deadly crocodile or shark encounters, Irukandji stings or in this case, blue-ringed octopus bites tend to travel very fast in Australia, even making international headlines.
It's not uncommon for bite victims to read articles or conversations online centred around their accident.
Paz says she was taken aback by what she saw.
"I felt that it was kind of racist," she says, adding that people were commenting on whether the victim was a "foreigner" who didn't respect wildlife.
For Mauricio, this couldn't be further from the truth.
"Paz is the sort of person who can look at the most hideous animal and find in those eyes a spark," he says.
"She sees our cat Uli's eyes in every other animal. It's alien to me and something that I admire about her."
Bite Club
Dave Pearson understands this phenomenon all too well, which is why he started Beyond the Bite, also known as Bite Club, a place where those who have had traumatic encounters with animals can share their experiences.
Dave was bitten by a shark in 2011.
Despite the obvious differences between the two encounters, Dave shares a lot of Paz's experiences.
"I started looking at the news stories about myself, and that's when I discovered the not-so-social side of social media," he says.
"I kind of expected, you know, everyone to go, sorry to hear this happened Dave … I didn't expect any of the victim blaming."
Happy to have escaped from the attack with his life, Dave didn't expect to feel anything other than luck when he left the hospital.
Instead, he began waking up screaming.
Loading...A carefree return to the ocean was also not on the cards. Dave says the stress didn't really hit until six months after he was bitten, when he'd made a physical recovery.
He felt lonely in his experience.
"Nobody has the answers and that was scary," Dave says.
"Mentally you don't know what to expect.
"A counsellor came and had a few words to me, and I didn't really understand much of what they were saying or take anything away from it."
In 2018, the Bite Club teamed up with the University of Sydney to research the direct and indirect psychological impacts of shark-bite events.
The study, a first of its kind, found one third of the members of Bite Club who had been bitten by a shark were experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder.
One particular focus of the research was the impact of media exposure on the victims.
The group's experiences ultimately led the researchers to advocate for guidelines for the media, akin to those used for reporting on suicide.
Once upon a time, human interactions with dangerous animals were not so uncommon.
And as these interactions have reduced, interest in them has increased, according to lead researcher Jennifer Taylor, a postdoctoral research associate in the Faculty of Medicine and Health at the University of Sydney.
"People spoke a little bit about not only social media, not only traditional media, but every social interaction," Dr Taylor says.
"People knew the story, would ask them to retell the story … and it might have been a space or a place where they actually did not want to get back into retelling their traumatic event.
"The other side of it too, and we certainly saw this in the shark space … in a conservation sense, [is] that these topics can get quite political as well."
In Paz's case, people were quick to point out the dangers of picking up shells, which were potential hiding places for the deadly octopus.
"Unsympathetic and unsupportive conversations can happen when someone's actually healing from a trauma," Dr Taylor says.
"Certainly, these are valuable conversations to have, but perhaps not with someone who's just survived a traumatic event."
Dr Taylor acknowledges that the 24-hour news cycle — always hungry for a story — is a challenge, but says journalists must strike a "delicate balance" between "the public's need to know and the person's right to heal in private".
Owning the story
As Dave sought to recover from the psychological impacts of being bitten by a shark, he found one thing made a big difference: talking to other people in Bite Club who had also had traumatic encounters with dangerous animals, and not just sharks.
The group quickly went global with victims of bear, dog, lion and hippo attacks contributing to the conversation.
"I just didn't want anyone to feel alone like I did. And it seems to work really well," Dave says.
When Dave would meet fellow bite victims, they'd be finishing each other's sentences.
In some instances, Dr Taylor says this connection to people with similar experiences and "owning their own story" can be a catalyst for post-traumatic growth.
"Once they'd sort of hit that stage or distance or resolved within themselves that it wasn't the worst thing that had ever happened, it was sort of like… If I can help someone going through something similar or help someone ease their discomfort, then I'm prepared to do so."
Paz says she was thankful that when news of her octopus bite went around the world, her name was left out of the stories.
But now, she has a desire to share what she's learnt.
Twisting her earring, which is the shape of an octopus tentacle, Paz says, "If people want me to be the octopus lady, the octopus lady I will be".
Loading...When Paz describes her experience, she goes between the words "weird" and "random", but her message is clear.
No matter how strange the event, if you know you're not feeling like yourself anymore, it's important to seek help.
This is something Dr Taylor reinforces.
"It's not an aspect of cognition. It's not an intellectual exercise. It's an emotional one," she says.
"It's about having felt that depth of fear. Even if you did not lose your life, you thought perhaps you could lose your life, and it is that level of fear that is instrumental … that is what changes biochemistry, the brain, neurotransmitters, all of that stuff.
"So it's really easy to underestimate yourself and the impact of those sorts of events."
Loading...Determined to return to the water, Paz took "baby steps" to make that happen.
And last Sunday, she took her first dip since being bitten.
"I'm afraid of this happening again, and I know the probability is very low … that's an irrational consequence of the accident," Paz says.
But allure of the ocean had become irresistible.
"I cried immediately after… It was like recovering from something that I lost, but that has always stayed with me. Something deeply mine.
"I missed it very much."
Credits
- Reporting: Angela Heathcote
- Video and photography: Angela Heathcote and Anthony Scully
- Illustrations: Sharon Gordon
- Digital production: Daniel Franklin