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

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PDF / EPUB File Name: The_Madness_A_Memoir_of_War_Fear_and_PTSD_-_Fergal_Keane.pdf, The_Madness_A_Memoir_of_War_Fear_and_PTSD_-_Fergal_Keane.epub 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. 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 Keane and I are sitting in a hotel suite in Belfast and we’re talking about his book, The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD, a moving, thought-provoking exploration that delves further into the territory he explored in the BBC documentary Living with PTSD, broadcast earlier this year. 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.

The Madness by Fergal Keane review - The Guardian

I felt guilty that I was acclaimed. But not enough to reject the awards. I needed them. They were my substitute for self-worth,” he confesses. I’ve been f**king scared all my life,” says Fergal Keane. “If there’s an underlying theme to my life, that’s it. I’m afraid of what’s going to happen, afraid of what I didn’t do ... Afraid of what someone will think. It’s a crippling way to go through life.” Keane tells many stories about the hot spots he’s reported from. He also considers the nature of evil and provides cynical but illuminating commentary on the entire journalistic enterprise. As might be expected, a significant part of the book is dedicated to describing how he attempted to run from, then wrestle with, his demons, including his hospitalizations, his interactions with his Alcoholics Anonymous advisor and his psychotherapist, a specialist in the treatment of PTSD.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: 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.”

BBC Radio 4 FM - Schedules, 3 - 9 July 2023 BBC Radio 4 FM - Schedules, 3 - 9 July 2023

I can visualise him writing it. Hear him reading it. Agonising. Trying to let it go. But, go to where? 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. The Madness is engaging without resorting to sensation. Fluent prose follows the decline of the political situation - and of Keane’s own mental health - in chilling, compelling detail” - Observer What does recovery look like for him? “It’s a matter of figuring out those boundaries and working on them. You should never not have an emotional reaction to something that is moving but you can’t let it take you over. And that’s what I’m working on. You can empathise but there’s a limit to what you can do and it doesn’t belong to you ... I think the basics would be to keep my promise: no war zones ... And it means loving life, spending time with friends, playing music.” 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 TimesThe 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. Instead, Fergal turned to booze– an informal name for alcohol. Fergal had been addicted to alcohol before he arrived in Rwanda, but now he had another addiction to cope with – the need to keep returning to war. Fergal knew it wasn’t healthy, but he couldn’t stop.

The Madness : A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD Fergal Keane

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.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!” Please read the review of this book by fellow reviewer Canadian Reader. It is sensational and moved me.

The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD

Part of his purpose in writing is to let others, who have had similar experiences, know that they are not alone.Part of his purpose in writing is to let others, who have had similar experiences, know that they are not alone 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. In Rwanda the thing that troubled him most was encountering a group of people seeking sanctuary at a prefecture, people who were likely subsequently murdered. It tormented him that there was something he might have done to protect them, though it was by no means clear how. It wasn’t even clear that his own crew would escape violence. “Everybody I know who went [to Rwanda] was, if not damaged by it, certainly hurt by it.” 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. Belfast, and Northern Ireland in its wider frame, has not stopped — that imperfect peace I described still makes too many headlines; the stories we read in the book Breaking: Trauma in the Newsroom, edited by journalists Leona O’Neill and Chris Lindsay.