“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 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 has reported for the BBC for more than 30 years and he has done crucial work from some of the world’s most violent conflicts. He writes about much of this, but this time filtered through the eyes of a man acknowledging his own suffering. He writes with vulnerability about addictions, breakdowns and hospitalisations, the most recent in 2018. In person he is carefully spoken, thoughtful and no less honest. He often quotes writers and poets. When I ask how he’s doing, he references two Van Morrison albums: A Period of Transition and And the Healing has Begun.
Despite a study by Prof Anthony Feinstein that found that 25 per cent of war reporters have PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), war reporters tend not to talk to each other about these things. “It’s interesting,” says Keane. “I was rereading Michael Herr’s Dispatches, an extraordinary book, and he actually does talk about the emotional toll, but few other people were doing it ... I came into journalism in 1979 working on local papers then working in Dublin, then RTÉ. It just wasn’t done. Imagine going to cover a genocide, and then you come out, and nobody in management or anywhere else is saying, ‘Do you think you might need to talk to someone?’ No, you just get pissed. After Rwanda, I took a plane to my sister’s wedding in Vancouver and I’m driving down a road ...”
Buying a new car in 2025? These are the best ways to finance it
The best crime fiction of 2024: Robert Harris, Jane Casey, Joe Thomas, Kellye Garrett, Stuart Neville and many more
We’re heading for the second biggest fiscal disaster in the history of the State
Housing in Ireland is among the most expensive and most affordable in the EU. How does that happen?
His voice cracks and tears come to his eyes. He can’t continue for a moment. When he recovers, he says: “Look if I get upset, that’s just part of it. It is what it is.”
Is it all still raw for him? “F**k yeah. And believe me, I’m a lot better than I was.”
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.”
Keane believes that he has probably had some form of PTSD since childhood. His father, the actor Éamonn Keane, was an alcoholic and the family lived with the uncertainty of what that would bring. “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. The science backs this up. The curiously comforting things about researching for the book was reading stuff that, in its essence to me, says ‘You’re not f**king nuts. What you’re going through is entirely natural’.”
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!”
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’
— Fergal Keane
In The Madness he also writes about how the violence of Irish history impacted psychologically on his family. He more or less maps out a chain of PTSD passed through the generations. “You can’t separate who any of us became from the kind of society we grew up in, and from the war that went before it, and from the famine, which ultimately created that war,” he says. “Is it possible that the people who [watched] their neighbours being carried on carts to be buried in mass graves, followed by dogs that were trying to eat the corpses ... that they weren’t marked and that their children weren’t marked? I don’t believe it is.”
He knows his initial impulse to be a reporter was a good one. He felt strongly about “people with power beating up people without power. Do you know The Grapes of Wrath, where Tom Joad is saying goodbye to his mother? She says: ‘Where will I find you?’ I’ll get emotional saying this, but he says, ‘You’ll see me everywhere, wherever there’s a people fighting for their rights, wherever there’s a cop beating up on a guy.’ I read that when I was in my teens, and it just really hit home.”
But he now also sees something dysfunctional in his relationship to the job. In some ways he found war zones exhilarating. When did he first feel that? “I suspect it was probably when I had just joined the Beeb and a couple of prisoners had been released down at the Maze. I was driving back up. And I was in traffic behind a couple of lorries of soldiers. And the Provos opened up at them from the Lower Falls and fired an RPG 7 at them. We all had to jump out of the cars and people were running and ducking down. And I didn’t feel afraid, I felt this extraordinary exhilaration. Extraordinary ... A normal person might have said ‘Is that right?’”
Looking back, he can see “the part of me that was addicted, the part of me that was ambitious, but also the part of me that gives a shit about people without power, people who are bullied ... Was it brave? Yes, there was physical bravery involved. There was moral courage involved in confronting some really, really nasty people [but], I did take risks that were, in retrospect, unconscionable.”
Like what? “Driving on the front lines near the airport in Donetsk and coming under shelling ... Any of the trips to the frontline in Ukraine, they were really risky and hairy. This is before the current war started ... But also I think of being in the Congo and driving up this track to meet this warlord, just me and a cameraman, and we had no idea if this guy was to be trusted or not.”
The Rwandan genocide still haunts him. He and his BBC crew were there when the massacre was still happening. He writes about the horror of the violence and encountering victims and perpetrators. He writes about the terror they felt as they trailed a truck full of refugee children through terrifying checkpoints manned by killers. “The thing about Rwanda and those roadblocks is there were no guarantees,” he says. “They could have done anything at any time. It was for me a dreadful experience.”
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.”
But not everyone developed PTSD. What does he think was different about how he processed his experiences? “I think it would be interesting to do a study [of PTSD] and ask how many came from functional, or happy families ... There is, in my case, this ‘hero child’ thing, this sense that I should be responsible, that I am responsible ... I carried that with me into war zones. I still carry it in my life all the time. ‘I should be able to fix this. I should be able to save that person.’”
For years he processed his feelings with alcohol. 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). By then the exhilaration he felt as a younger man had long shifted to “a petrified fear”.
In 2006 he recalls being on the outskirts of a village in South Lebanon. “And even though there was a ceasefire, they were still whacking people. And we pulled up at a petrol station, and there was a big debate in the car, ‘Should we go? should we not?’. And I really didn’t want to go ... But I didn’t want to say no, in front of the others. I was really terrified because this was after we’d been in a mortar attack.”
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’.”
Some years ago he promised not to go to any “hot wars”, by which he meant he wouldn’t go near the frontline. Even this, he thinks, suggests some denial about the trauma of covering war at all. “It’s a f**king rationalisation. I admit it. I’ll never get better from this thing if I don’t admit it.”
There are other ways his perspective on the job has changed. “When I was much younger, I would pop up at the scene of a massacre or an assassination and I was just totally focused. ‘Get the quotes, get the facts and file it.’ As the years have gone on, I just find it harder and harder to do.
“There’s a great line by Jimmy Simmons, a Belfast poet [in] Lament for a Dead Policemen. He talks about a policeman being shot and ... it’s a letter by his wife and she talks about the reporter’s ‘phoney sympathy, fishing for widow’s tears’. I wouldn’t say my sympathy was phoney ... But when you’re there and the interview is going on, you know that if it’s emotional, it’s going to have a much more powerful impact on the audience. Every one of us knows that, if we’re honest. I find that really hard to deal with and now I become uncomfortable when people get emotional on camera.”
As he’s saying this, I’m aware that Keane has been emotional during our interview. “I’m much more careful now,” he says. “I check that people are okay. I follow up. If they’re people who don’t speak English, I phone the translator and get them to call and see how they’re doing.
“I made this film in Ukraine, with the women of Bucha [about Russian atrocities in the city]. One of them really wanted to do the interview and she got quite upset during it. Afterwards, I hated myself. I really did. Which, I suppose, begs the question, why am I still doing that?”
When I was going into war zones ... I could see stuff coming. Read people’s faces – how a guy was at a roadblock. Scanning everything. These are useful skills to have but it’s mentally exhausting because you can’t switch it off
— Fergal Keane
Why is he? He laughs. “I lead myself into that ... In that case, I felt this story has to be told. I was getting quite mad about all the people who were talking about how this was all Nato’s fault, and that the big powers should sort this out between themselves. I wanted to do a piece that said: ‘Forget that. This is about what’s being done to people without any power [by] an aggressive military power.’ And so I did, but the interviews just left me drained. All these women they came back to us afterwards and said, ‘Thank you, it really matters.’ And they showed the film locally. But I felt a level of discomfort.”
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?’”
But the work still matters, he says. “I don’t care if one person sees it, it matters. It’s institutional memory.”
He talks about the “culture shock” of coming out of a conflict zone to “a nice, safe European city”. He found the pandemic fascinating on that score. “It was the first shared experience that we all had of something that was potentially lethal ... I found that quite equalising. It slowed the world down ... I felt calmer than I felt in a long time because there was no way I could travel anywhere, so I couldn’t indulge my addiction. And it was peaceful. Suddenly the world stopped. It was like the two days around Christmas. I love that too. Because everything stops. And I slow down. And I felt I was kind of equipped for all the fear that was going on.”
It occurs to me, just then, that being in a war zone probably normalised the hypervigilance he had as a consequence of his childhood. He agrees. “When I was going into war zones, I was f**king made for it. I could see stuff coming. Read people’s faces – how a guy was at a roadblock. Scanning everything. These are useful skills to have but it’s mentally exhausting because you can’t switch it off.”
He explains how his PTSD can be triggered. “I was on the plane this morning coming over. And a baby started really crying. And I’m like this,” he hunches up his shoulders and looks distressed. “I’m totally tensed up and I’m thinking ‘when will this ever stop?’ Or if someone drops a plate ... or slams the door, or a car backfires.”
He looks haunted. His eyes fill with tears and he has difficulty talking for a moment. “You feel like a bit of a freak,” he says quietly.
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.”
He used to say, in interviews, that he “compartmentalised” any upset he felt on the job. “I compartmentalise? Bollocks. Not really. It breaks through. It breaks through.”
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.”
What does he hope the book achieves? “I hope the book continues what the film started, a conversation,” he says. “I think we’re in more emotionally literate times ... And the interesting thing about the film was that the reaction was entirely positive. It was often people saying, ‘Yeah, I think I know what you’re talking about.’ And that wasn’t just soldiers or other journalists but nurses, people in emergency services, people who’ve had troubled childhoods.”
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.”
He’s increasingly interested in people who keep kindness alive in hard circumstances. He mentions several such people in the book. His next project involves a return to people living in marginal parts of Britain whom he first interviewed 20 years ago.
At the end of our interview, we discuss music. He recently bought a mandola. I recently bought a mandolin. We talk about Dirk Powell, Andy Irvine and John Doyle, a friend of Keane’s who visited him when he was in hospital. As he talks about the folk musicians he loves, his voice lightens. “When you have been doing the stuff that I do, it can just become a really dark rabbit hole,” he says. “You lose your sense of perspective.” He smiles. “But then if you go to a good gig or play music with friends, you see the world is not all darkness.”
The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD by Fergal Keane is published by William Collins
