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

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In 1999 he went into rehab and stopped drinking, but he wasn’t diagnosed with PTSD until 12 years ago (though, unbeknown to him, in 1999 a doctor noted that he likely had PTSD in his file). I think growing up in an alcoholic home, if it didn’t give me PTSD, which I think it did, it certainly made me vulnerable emotionally from a young age. In 2020, he announced that he was stepping down as the BBC’s Africa editor because of his ongoing struggles with PTSD. Among the war-torn regions, one has to mention Rwanda where the author was shocked by the scale and brutality of the genocide: more than half a million Tutsis were killed, often hacked to death, by Hutus. It’s never over – I can always tell how wound up I am by how quick my reflexes are if there’s a bang nearby.

The Madness by Fergal Keane | Waterstones

war photographers, war correspondents are a small fraternity, and they tend to leap from conflict to conflict to conflict .I think there may be a Ukrainian breakthrough sooner rather than later, but when a society has been so militarised in a relatively short space of time, what are the consequences of that in peacetime?

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

It’s manageable if I don’t let myself get too strung out by things, and I also take antidepressant medication. It’s clear he was an emotionally wounded person with a compensatory need to demonstrate bravery and fearlessness.I particularly enjoyed his sections on the Irish famine and his grandmother’s involvement in the Irish uprising in the 1920’s and how he connected these things to ongoing generational trauma within his family and how this may have primed him to seek out reporting from conflict zones around the world.