In the beginning of Fergal Keane: Living With PTSD (BBC One, Monday), the BBC correspondent, who grew up in Cork, explains that one of the driving imperatives behind his life, covering war zones, is the ego. “I wanted to be seen, to win awards,” he said of a career in which he has reported from the front lines of Rwanda, Kosovo and only this year Kyiv.
Keane is aware that he is potentially open to accusations of solipsism by making a documentary about his fight against post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) – in light of the fact that the communities he reports have invariably suffered much more. He seems restless, for example, by giving an interview from Ukraine at the end of the film, surrounded by women and children fleeing the Russian bombing, saying “I don’t feel I have the right to talk about trauma.”
This ego comes to the surface once or twice – for example, when he sits down with a post-traumatic stress disorder in Belfast and directs the conversation back to himself. But after a career spanning decades, Keane is nothing but self-aware, and what could be an exercise is navel-watching, instead a fascinating and generous study of intergenerational pain and how demons from childhood (his father, actor Eamon Keane, was an alcoholic) may haunt us later in life.
The hotline in Keane’s life was Rwanda, where he was sent to witness the genocide of the early 1990s. He admits that he was uncomfortable with the concert. As a radio reporter in South Africa who has just arrived at the BBC from RTÉ, the opportunity to present the documentary Panorama on BBC One was a major breakthrough.
“I went to Rwanda as someone who thought I knew what war was like,” he said. “Genocide was something very different. I discovered that I have nightmares, flashes … I try to cure it by drinking. ”
PTSD for Keane manifests itself in many unexpected ways. He had alcoholism and nightmares. It can also be triggered by something as harmless as rattling dishes. “Sitting in the room where someone is trying to wash the dishes, I shudder,” he says. “Can’t you hear how loud that is?” No one hears it as loudly as it is in my head. “
There was an inevitable breakdown in 2008 when he sobered up and was officially diagnosed with PTSD. But one of the questions he intends to answer in the new film is whether his mental health problems are entirely due to war coverage – or whether it is rooted in the trauma of a family who survived the famine in North Kerry and then the War of Independence. and the Civil War.
“What has history done not only for the country but also for people’s minds?” He says, driving to Listwell (his uncle’s home and spiritual heart, playwright John B. Keane).
In the end, Keane has no definite answers. Nor has he completely freed himself from his addiction to war reporting. In Kyiv, on the eve of the Russian attack, he admitted that he was torn by his departure. And in Lviv, where he talks to refugees, he admits he is far from finding peace. “I am a reporter, but my topic is war. “I’m rationalizing it,” he said. “It’s happening – it’s not over, the story for me and the post-traumatic stress disorder.”
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