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

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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. I did this. Then I did that. I went here. After that I went there. And there too. I saw this and that, and then more and more. But does it mean anything..."

BBC Radio 4 - The Madness by Fergal Keane - Episode guide

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 I could never do this book justice in a review to equal those excellently and in-depth written by Canadian Reader and Nat K. 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.

Woman's Hour — Weekend Woman’s Hour: Caitlin Moran, Trichotillomania, Prison Officers, TikTok Nans, Olivia Dean Yes, it’s about the conquest of Ireland by the Elizabethans – basically the beginning of Empire. So much of history, to me, is about people who don’t see the ground shifting under their feet, and this new book is very much about that. It’s called The Golden World, from The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. David McIlveen, described as “simply one of the outstanding camera journalists of his generation”, takes us inside the Royal London Hospital during the Covid pandemic; different from international assignments: 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. Farming Today — 08/07/23 Farming Today This Week. Eggs: hatchery; beak trimming; free-range to barn; bird flu and vaccine. UK-grown flowers.

The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD - William Collins The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD - William Collins

You know, the truth is, I was an alcoholic long before I got to Rwanda. But I was in the kind of functioning alcoholic - what they call, you know, managing it stage of the of the disease. Whether it is 19th century theatre or verse, or today’s pop culture, Irish migrants and their descendants have deeply influenced and steered the UK’s literature and arts. Think of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw or, more recently, the Beatles, the Sex Pistols, Oasis, or Terry Wogan, Paul Merton, Claire Foy, the Irish and their descendants have had a profound influence on Britishness. The Irish have also been highly influential in the world of business, politics and sport. I will return to it because this is important work; the experiences of correspondents, reporters, camera operators and photographers that take the reader outside the often strict boundaries of news. 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.

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I questioned how much control the author really had over his choices given the unconscious drive to put himself in dangerous situations. The destructive cycles are easy to hide under layers of heroic ideation and real world cynicism. 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. Fergal Keane's unflinching account of the effects of trauma on his own life is the source of his book's profound capacity to move its reader. With radical honesty and openness, and a vulnerability that I suspect required no small amount of courage, he more than fulfils the aim he sets out for himself in the prologue: to let others who bear similar burdens know they are not alone.' Kevin Powers, bestselling and prize-winning author of The Yellow Birds 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

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

Part of his purpose in writing is to let others, who have had similar experiences, know that they are not aloneI used to be able to deny it to myself, but it got much worse. By the 2006 Lebanon war I was petrified.

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

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?’” 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.” 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 And yet he continued to return to war zones. He believes that he is, to some extent, “addicted to war”. “If you’re a drug addict or an alcoholic killing yourself people will say, ‘Oh, my God, stop.’ War is the only addiction that people will come up to you and say, ‘That was brilliant’.”

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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. 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.”