The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD from Sunday Times Bestselling Author and BBC Correspondent Fergal Keane

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Martha Gellhorn. There’s a sense of empathy and of being present with people that really moves me. I was going to say Ryszard Kapuściński, but though he writes magnificently, I’m not sure how much of it I can believe. Having read through the Keane memoir and into Breaking, I found the experience too much — too soon for me after my own writing of Living with Ghosts. Keane drank intermittently as a teenager, but when he was 21, a girlfriend, concerned about his heavy drinking and the sadness that seemed to be fuelling it, referred him to a physician in Cork. The doctor told Keane he could never drink again or it would eventually kill him. Keane was prescribed antidepressants, took them, and abstained from alcohol for several years, but he returned to drinking with a glass of champagne in celebration of a new job. His subsequent career path did him no favours. War correspondents are generally a hard-drinking lot. Self-medication and temporary emotional-anesthetization with alcohol are common. OK, it’s time to reveal the answer to my question. I asked about the name of the PTSD-like condition suffered by soldiers during World War One.

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I got very close to being diabetic and was told I had to lose weight. I went at it and got one of those calorie-counting apps, and I think it got slightly obsessive. I lost a lot of weight, but I now feeling guilty if eat French fries. The Madness, an informative and often wrenching memoir, confirms Hedges’ remarks and then some. Keane opens up about his experiences in many conflict zones, including South Africa, Rwanda, Kosovo, the DRC, Sudan, and Ukraine. Some of these stories concern the tragic loss of colleagues. His main focus in the book, however, is his own mental health: his alcoholism, breakdowns, and diagnosis of PTSD. The other addiction proved to be harder to quit. “If I feel self-loathing I start to need to escape to war, the ultimate land of forgetting.”Fascinating. From his childhood in Ireland to reporting in the most terrible zones of conflict in recent times. Does the size of your carbon footprint depend on where in the world you were born? Listen to find out! Ask Leona O’Neill to put peace into words after seeing what she saw on the cold ground of Creggan in Derry in April 2019. What does he hope the book achieves? “I hope the book continues what the film started, a conversation,” he says. “I think we’re in more emotionally literate times ... And the interesting thing about the film was that the reaction was entirely positive. It was often people saying, ‘Yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about.’ And that wasn’t just soldiers or other journalists but nurses, people in emergency services, people who’ve had troubled childhoods.” Throughout my career, every time I arrived at the scene of an atrocity or fatal crash, I have first always said a private prayer for the dead or dying. It has never mattered to me what religious or political views they held. They all had someone who loved them.”

Fergal Keane, war addict: ‘You feel like a bit of a freak Fergal Keane, war addict: ‘You feel like a bit of a freak

Part of his purpose in writing is to let others, who have had similar experiences, know that they are not alone. There’s a great line by Jimmy Simmons, a Belfast poet [in] Lament for a Dead Policemen. He talks about a policeman being shot and ... it’s a letter by his wife and she talks about the reporter’s ‘phoney sympathy, fishing for widow’s tears’. I wouldn’t say my sympathy was phoney ... But when you’re there and the interview is going on, you know that if it’s emotional, it’s going to have a much more powerful impact on the audience. Every one of us knows that, if we’re honest. I find that really hard to deal with and now I become uncomfortable when people get emotional on camera.” Fergal had a nervous breakdown– a period of acute mental illness leaving him unable to cope with life. After the terrible things Fergal had witnessed, you might expect him to call it a day– a phrase meaning to decide to stop what you are doing. But Fergal’s addictions made that impossible. How does he think his PTSD manifested when he was a child? “The physical manifestation was clear. I twitch still but it was rampant then. I was fearful. One of the things I noticed I did all the time was apologising. ‘I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.’ I still catch myself doing that sometimes. Second guessing. ‘If I did this, would it mean that this would be okay?’ Dear Jesus, what a way to exhaust your mind!” Quite a few people have said to me: “You’re really hard on yourself.” It’s a self-protective mechanism – if I’m really tough with myself, then nobody else can be as tough on me. It’s been a habit all my life and goes hand in hand with shame, beating myself up; but it isn’t healthy, and that’s something I learned from writing the book, and the reaction to it.Fergal Keane on the frontline in Donbas, Ukraine in 2016, as featured in his 2020 Horizon special Fergal Keane: Living with PTSD. Photograph: Unknown/BBC/Fergal Keane As migration, integration and assimilation dominate public debate in Britain, Fergal examines the impact of the longest and biggest immigrant story in the history of the United Kingdom. Keane also explores – though he could do so in more depth – the disturbing power dynamics of a job that meant “the suffering of others was my daily bread”, and which affords foreign journalists privilege over their subjects through the passports and wealth that allow them to leave and get help. After reporting on the genocide in Rwanda, he “was shadowed by the memory of those who had witnessed the murder of their families, endured rape and mutilation, and unlike me had no access to medication or therapy”.

BBC Sounds - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Available Episodes BBC Sounds - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Available Episodes

When Fergal returned home from Rwanda, he started having nightmares– upsetting and frightening dreams. It was obvious he was traumatised from the violence he had seen, but still Fergal didn’t go to a psychiatrist – a medical doctor who specialises in treating mental illness. Probable COVID-19 infection is associated with subsequent poorer mental health and greater loneliness in the UK (www.nature.com) So did other struggles. Fergal’s father was a talented actor, a self-taught man of letters and a lifelong alcoholic. Searching for his drunken father in pubs and alleyways, the young Keane developed a bone-deep sense that something was wrong with the world and that it was his responsibility to put it right. Growing up in an alcoholic’s home made Keane anxious, hyper-alert and keen to escape. That escape arrived in the early 1980s, when his budding journalistic career took him from Ireland to South Africa.I read an awful lot of poetry – Sharon Olds, Anna Akhmatova, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon. Raymond Carver has written some moving poetry, and he’s got this line that really speaks to me: “All of us, all of us, all of us trying to save our immortal souls, some ways seemingly more round about and mysterious than others”. That’s it. I recently came upon a 2013 NPR interview in which Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning American journalist/war correspondent and self-described “adrenaline junkie,” commented on the psychology of those who report from conflict zones: Elsewhere in the book, he describes “a vast graveyard. The rancid, offal reek of the dead rose from pits, ditches, houses, the banks of streams and rivers; a smell that settled in the mind as much as it lingered on our clothes and turned our stomachs.” Keane writes in detail that demands attention. That, at times, makes us shudder; makes us walk in his shoes and in those steps that he took into many places of danger: