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

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But the work still matters, he says. “I don’t care if one person sees it, it matters. It’s institutional memory.” 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. In the prologue of his book, he writes of a conversation in which he says: “I should have stopped after Belfast.” He knows, of course, that he was not going to stop then. Those of us who knew him then knew he was not going to stop. 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.” 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 from Sunday Times

I think about all of that in the context of the conflict in the North and, then, on its roads to an imperfect peace. This is a book that can be read without following its chapter chronology. One of the writers is Barbara McCann, a broadcast journalist with a career that stretches beyond 40 years. She knows the story of this place and other places, and she shares something I have not read before. 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.

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..." Things have changed. Media organisations are much more conscious of the mental health of their journalists now. Recently, he says, “the old addict in me was saying, ‘Maybe I could get the train across to Kyiv’”. A colleague said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea, do you?” He laughs. “It was calm, deliberate. He was right ... Now you’re offered assessment the minute you’re out of a conflict zone. You’re also encouraged to take time off to just decompress.” Moral wounds have this peculiarity – they may be hidden, but they never close; always painful, always ready to bleed when touched, they remain fresh and open in the heart.

BBC Radio 4 - All in the Mind, Fergal Keane and PTSD BBC Radio 4 - All in the Mind, Fergal Keane and PTSD

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.My review falls short mostly, I think, because I approached the book from a totally different mindset: One where I am forever in search of, but perhaps will never understand, and thus ever in awe of the motivation that leads journalists, war correspondents, news photographers and reporters to do what they do – and they should rightly find recognition for their craft. So did other struggles. Fergal’s father was a talented actor, a self-taught man of letters and a lifelong alcoholic. Searching for his drunken father in pubs and alleyways, the young Keane developed a bone-deep sense that something was wrong with the world and that it was his responsibility to put it right. Growing up in an alcoholic’s home made Keane anxious, hyper-alert and keen to escape. That escape arrived in the early 1980s, when his budding journalistic career took him from Ireland to South Africa. 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. The Madness is a powerful account of the brutality of conflict and the horrors of war - both across the world and inside the self. In sharp prose, Keane writes compellingly about where his thirst for truth comes from, and takes him to the frontline of the some of the most infamous violence of our times. Unsettled ghosts rise from the bogs of Kerry; unmarked graves in Northern Ireland; Rwandan soil; a cellar in Palestine - what's clear is man's inhumanity to man is relentless and haunts the writer, driving him to understand our most base motivations, to rationalise terror, to witness and report conflict at close range and ultimately, to do no harm. The Madness is an extraordinary, captivating account of one man's journey in search of truth, as he excavates the human story from chaos.' Elaine Feeney