Journalists should be given “emotional flak jackets” to deal with ways their work could impact their mental health, such as through online abuse and burnout, it has been suggested.

The call came as a journalist in BBC Monitoring, which investigates online disinformation and extremism, revealed up to eight of his BBC colleagues had left over the course of a year to 18 months because of the daily abuse they faced.

Shayan Sardarizadeh told a virtual panel about mental wellbeing in the newsroom, hosted by City University, on Wednesday: “That was the moment when there was a realisation something is wrong, we need to do something.