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

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Fergal Keane opens doors into closed places. He lets us look inside those complex compartments where fear, anxiety, anger and panic lurk, and he tells a story of being afraid all of his life… beautifully written… This is an important book” - Irish Times He dives into his family history for the roots of his twin addiction – to alcohol and war reporting. His father was a talented actor, but alcoholic and sometimes violent. His father cast a long shadow in his childhood. 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!” 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. Please read the review of this book by fellow reviewer Canadian Reader. It is sensational and moved me.

The Madness by Fergal Keane and Breaking: Trauma in the The Madness by Fergal Keane and Breaking: Trauma in the

Fergal Keane had a difficult childhood in the Ireland still feeling the after effects of The Troubles. With an alcoholic father who could be charming, and an emotionally distant mother, he lived like a ghost, barely breathing for fear of bringing himself to the attention of the parents he loved dearly. School was no better, with the brothers and priests handing our corporal punishment freely, for no other reason than they could. Many children got more than corporal punishment.Brian Rowan is the author of Living with Ghosts: The Inside Story from a Troubles Mind (Merrion Press) 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. 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.” There is still no agreement on a legacy process to answer the questions of Northern Ireland’s past. But, eventually, when some story-telling archive is established, these contributions will add to understanding. That is the worth of this book. Its value. Why it is important.

BBC Radio 4 - How the Irish Shaped Britain, Kingdoms of the BBC Radio 4 - How the Irish Shaped Britain, Kingdoms of the

And I’m Sam. In this programme, we’ll be hearing about the extraordinary life of a well-known BBC journalist, Fergal Keane. As a BBC war correspondent, Fergal witnessed some of the most violent events in recent history. Fergal’s reporting helped his television audiences make sense of the horrors of war, but underneath there were more personal reasons attracting him to the frontline. His words are a personal description of the physical and psychological wounds that come with Belfast’s reporting beat. I could never do this book justice in a review to equal those excellently and in-depth written by Canadian Reader and Nat K. Another book that left me with this level of discomfort and unease was Francisco Cantú’s The Line Becomes A River. Another book filled with immense intensity. To me, it’s unfathomable what people are capable of. And continue to be capable of.

He’s increasingly interested in people who keep kindness alive in hard circumstances. He mentions several such people in the book. His next project involves a return to people living in marginal parts of Britain whom he first interviewed 20 years ago. The drinking culture has gone. It was romanticised, along with the broken soul, but there’s no tolerance for it now. The other good thing is it’s no longer possible for foreign correspondents to drop into people’s countries, write whatever they want, go away, and not get called on it if it’s bullshit. It was an almost neo-colonial form of journalism. But the shrinking of foreign coverage and foreign bureaux is worrying. A brutally honest exploration of what motivates Keane to keep reporting on atrocities despite the toll on his mental health… Gentle but unflinching” - Guardian, Book of the Day These experiences make his meeting with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, a poet who survived the genocide, one of the most moving parts of the book. He had unknowingly followed the convoy escorting her and her mother to safety – hidden under blankets and orphaned children – years earlier. “The girl who will help me years later is here. I have no idea of this. We do not know each other. She is hiding and I am too focused on all that is going on around me.” As an adult, she offers him a possible way of living with his painful memories. Some years ago he promised not to go to any “hot wars”, by which he meant he wouldn’t go near the frontline. Even this, he thinks, suggests some denial about the trauma of covering war at all. “It’s a f**king rationalisation. I admit it. I’ll never get better from this thing if I don’t admit it.”

The Madness by Fergal Keane | Waterstones

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. 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”.

There are other ways his perspective on the job has changed. “When I was much younger, I would pop up at the scene of a massacre or an assassination and I was just totally focused. ‘Get the quotes, get the facts and file it.’ As the years have gone on, I just find it harder and harder to do. Some of the most moving parts of this rich, intense, and thought-provoking memoir concern his efforts to transform his personal narrative about Rwanda by thinking about the goodness, kindness, and deep humanity of people living in the direst and most distressing conditions. He writes warmly and lovingly of Anatoly and Svetlana Kosse, a Ukrainian couple in their sixties living in the bombed-out village of Piski in Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine (whom he met after war began in the eastern part of the country in 2014). He also describes going to visit the novelist, poet, and Rwandan genocide survivor Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse. Her counsel to him came in the form of a poem by French Auschwitz survivor Charlotte Delbo, whose husband was executed in the camp: 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.” What is it like when PTSD symptoms get bad? “What happens is my mood starts to get lower and lower. All the time I’m hypervigilant and twitching and stuff like that ... I noticed when I’m sliding, because I start forgetting things. I misplace things. And then I start fixating on an idea, a worry ... a particular fear.”

The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420420 | World of The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420420 | World of

Fergal Keane is blessed with a magical pen, under which flowers can blossom, as the Chinese would say. I think he is one of the few journalists who write like a poet. In fact, I think Keane does write poetry. The limpid prose and his unflinching honesty made this book, dealing with difficult subjects of trauma and addiction, so compelling. He seems most upset when trying to explain his symptoms and what triggers them. “You know what? I think at some level I feel ashamed of it,” he says. “I’m still dealing with that. It’s so weird to lose control emotionally. It feels shameful. I can’t give you a rational explanation for it.” and I began to have nightmares of Rwanda. And of course, at that stage, you know, it was obvious that I was traumatised but, again, did I go to a psychiatrist? No, I didn't. I kept doing the job.Probable COVID-19 infection is associated with subsequent poorer mental health and greater loneliness in the UK (www.nature.com)

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