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. 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. 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. 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

The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420468 | World of The Madness By Fergal Keane | Used | 9780008420468 | World of

The telling of the story of Britain and Ireland has been dominated by narratives of conquest and rebellion in which a powerful empire attempts to subdue an indomitable native spirit – two different identities colliding throughout history. Fergal presents a more complex narrative. He begins with the old kingdoms of the Irish Sea, and travels through the time of the Vikings to the 19th and 20th century migrations, all the way to present day. Throughout the Irish have shaped literature, culture, politics and the physical landscape.

Summary

And finally, the phrase call it a day means to stop what you are doing because you no longer want to. Once again, our six minutes are up. Goodbye for now! What is it like when PTSD symptoms get bad? “What happens is my mood starts to get lower and lower. All the time I’m hypervigilant and twitching and stuff like that ... I noticed when I’m sliding, because I start forgetting things. I misplace things. And then I start fixating on an idea, a worry ... a particular fear.” 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. Fergal had a nervous breakdown– a period of acute mental illness leaving him unable to cope with life. After the terrible things Fergal had witnessed, you might expect him to call it a day– a phrase meaning to decide to stop what you are doing. But Fergal’s addictions made that impossible.

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

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 Lindsay, a BBC journalist, writes the opening chapter — Hard Cover; his story from Ardoyne in north Belfast on 12 July 2005 — one of those days in the city when parade and protest meet. He dives into his family history for the roots of his twin addiction – to alcohol and war reporting. His father was a talented actor, but alcoholic and sometimes violent. His father cast a long shadow in his childhood. 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

This set him on the path of choosing journalism, and then reporting from front lines to prove his worth. Especially to himself. Keane has much more to think about; what happened on the many — the too many — front lines from which he reported. These stories develop. They never end. His words are a personal description of the physical and psychological wounds that come with Belfast’s reporting beat. 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 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.