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

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Woman's Hour — Weekend Woman’s Hour: Caitlin Moran, Trichotillomania, Prison Officers, TikTok Nans, Olivia Dean Part of his purpose in writing is to let others, who have had similar experiences, know that they are not alone

The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420437 | World of The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420437 | World of

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: For a number of years, we worked in the same BBC newsroom in Belfast, when the story from the North was still its fighting and, at a time when peace felt like a pipe dream. I stayed in that newsroom — stayed too long.Not devastation in a foreign field but on our own doorstep, with people dying and suffering all around us.” How does he feel about the fact that important foreign reporting often isn’t consumed as much as more trivial news stories? “It was ever thus. When I came out of Rwanda, and I did what was the most important film of my life, which was the first documentary during the worst genocide since the Nazis ... I remember getting the figures the following day, and just thinking ‘God, what was it for?’” When he first started reporting he did not know or understand what he was suffering from. The madness that caused such abject pain. Until he found a few counselors and psychologists that thought outside the square and helped him to slowly mend. Though the emotional scars remain. Keane, a veteran journalist with the BBC, is renowned for his dispatches from war-torn zones in South Africa, Rwanda, the Middle East, Iraq and Ukraine. He is particularly good at bringing out the human aspects of the conflicts with novelist attention to detail. He reported the downing of MH 17, noticing the bodies from the Malaysian jet scattered in the sunflower field in Ukraine and a toddler on the roadside, covered by a flimsy sheet. 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 felt himself unlovable, desperate for the validation he imagined would come from going to war: “The melancholy boy on the edge of the playground was thinking of the days when he could show himself unafraid and have the world applaud him for it.”

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Keane forced himself to be there. That is what news is about. Being in those places of the biggest headlines. Places of great danger. Being with the fighting and the dead. It is a type of addiction.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. I used to be able to deny it to myself, but it got much worse. By the 2006 Lebanon war I was petrified. 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. Professor Daryl O'Connor's new research finds that people who got Covid-19 early in the pandemic were twice as likely to experience depressive symptoms than those who didn't. Part of his purpose in writing is to let others, who have had similar experiences, know that they are not alone.