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

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On a more personal note, I’m generally not one for memoirs, but Fergal Keane’s writing, honesty, insights and perspectives (often giving both sides of his story or the event he found himself in), made it spellbinding and engrossing. 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.

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I’m fascinated by the Napoleonic wars because they changed Europe and the world, but the idea of being on the field of Waterloo with a telescope fills me with horror. I think it would be interesting to do a study [of PTSD] and ask how many came from functional, or happy families .A tough but essential read that goes some way to explaining the dangers and cost of this type of career. In this series Fergal Keane explores the profound influence the Irish have had on Britain over many centuries, from the vanished tribes of the ancient Celtic world to the Ryanair generation of today. Keane is gentle but unflinching in describing an obsession that had its roots in a difficult childhood, overshadowed by an alcoholic, sometimes violent father. He desperately wanted to give up drink, could not, and died in his mid-sixties after years of alcohol abuse and multiple hospitalizations.

The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420468 | World of The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420468 | World of

I particularly enjoyed his sections on the Irish famine and his grandmother’s involvement in the Irish uprising in the 1920’s and how he connected these things to ongoing generational trauma within his family and how this may have primed him to seek out reporting from conflict zones around the world. The first major study of war reporters and PTSD appeared in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 2002. A few years ago, when he came over for dinner with his adopted Chinese daughter, he brought a pack of non-alcoholic beer. He also describes going to visit the novelist, poet, and Rwandan genocide survivor Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse. 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.I was getting quite mad about all the people who were talking about how this was all Nato’s fault, and that the big powers should sort this out between themselves. That escape arrived in the early 1980s, when his budding journalistic career took him from Ireland to South Africa. Fergal Keane brings an unstinting honesty to his story of the addictive personality he inherited from his family, which goes far beyond alcohol and drugs, in driving him to seek out and report upon war and upheaval in some of most dangerous countries in the world. He is one of the BBC’s most distinguished correspondents and has covered most of the world’s conflicts of the last thirty years.

The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD from Sunday Times The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD from Sunday Times

Fergal Keane had a difficult childhood in the Ireland still feeling the after effects of The Troubles.Imagine going to cover a genocide, and then you come out, and nobody in management or anywhere else is saying, ‘Do you think you might need to talk to someone? There is, in my case, this ‘hero child’ thing, this sense that I should be responsible, that I am responsible .

BBC Radio 4 - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Available now BBC Radio 4 - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Available now

Sometimes the presence of a journalist as witness may reduce brutality, even perhaps save lives, if aggressors fear someone recording their misdeeds. He speculates that the Famine of the 1800s (which his grandmother’s elders survived and talked about), the Easter Rising, Civil War, and the protracted sectarian violence of the twentieth century have all contributed to the shaping of his character. Not every place told an easily defined story of psychological disintegration, but they would accumulate and set my face towards a reckoning. They may be used by those companies to build a profile of your interests and show you relevant adverts on other sites.Clare Downham (Liverpool University), Professor Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (ex NUI Galway), Professor Diarmaid MacCullough (ex Oxford University), Fiona Shaw, Professor Thomas Devine (ex Edinburgh University), Dr. 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”. Until he found a few counselors and psychologists that thought outside the square and helped him to slowly mend. How does he feel about the fact that important foreign reporting often isn’t consumed as much as more trivial news stories? Shortly after his father’s death in 1990, the BBC asks Keane to become its southern Africa correspondent.