This programme contains some strong language
and graphic images which some viewers may find upsetting.
Moscow maintains there are no plans to invade Ukraine,
but as you've seen, large scale military drills
are still taking place.
Our special correspondent Fergal Keane, travelled from Senkivka
in Ukraine to the capital Kyiv, meeting people
who could be in the path of any Russian advance.
Here on the border, with the Russians just over there,
there's no sense that things have been conclusively resolved,
not at all.
It's just a pause in what remains a very tense situation.
I'm in Kyiv and I've just made one of the hardest decisions
of my career.
It's about to turn into a big war here and inside of me...
..the addictive part, but also the part that wants to witness
history, really wants to stay.
But I've made a promise...
..to myself,
the people I love - no more wars.
Enough, go home, so I'm going home in the morning.
How much have you read about PTSD?
How much have you studied it?
I'm the guy who goes to a therapy session
and at the end of it
was given literature to read
and didn't read it.
Because I wanted to be away from PTSD.
You know, I wanted to keep it at arm's length, and why?
Because I wanted to keep doing what I was doing.
I wanted to keep going to the wars.
My name is Fergal Keane, I'm a reporter.
For over 30 years, I've covered conflict for the BBC
from across the world.
Murder, mutilation, rape.
It all happened here in Freetown as the rebel army swept into the city.
Saddam Hussein and his regime have finally been destroyed.
In that time, I've seen the best of humanity and the worst.
Too often, I'm afraid, the worst.
The second suicide bomber detonated his explosives
in the middle of a crowd. People were blasted and burned.
Even those familiar with such horror were moved.
You can hear the shelling here behind me.
There is no ceasefire, it's an illusion.
It's taken a heavy toll.
I have a condition called post-traumatic stress disorder.
There's a set of symptoms, whether it's twitching
and having nightmares or flashbacks.
It's a place of extreme fear is how I would ultimately define it.
And what's surprising is, for a journalist and someone
who spent my life investigating things, is how little I know,
actually, beyond my own experience.
And maybe this process of investigation
and talking to other people who suffer from post-traumatic stress,
maybe that can let some light in.
BIRDSONG
Part of me is scared stiff making this film
because I know it's a, it's a journey into myself.
But I'm sick of being scared.
And the defining characteristic of, for me, living with PTSD
has been fear.
You know, fear of nightmares
where I wake up
and I'm under a pile of bodies.
Let's go.
Or in my dreams, I see animals devouring human corpses.
Come on, Pop, let's go.
In daily life, it is as mundane as
sitting in a room
where somebody is trying to do the dishes and flinching,
and saying, "Can't you hear how loud that is?"
And them looking at you, "No..."
Because nobody hears it as loud as I do in my head.
And there have been people around me, who love me and care for me
and want to reach me,
but when you're in it, you shut them out, you isolate.
I do.
I always know when it's getting bad,
because that acute sense of threat
is louder and I feel it spiralling, you know?
The BBC's Africa Editor and veteran war correspondent Fergal Keane
has announced he'll be stepping down from his position,
citing the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Fergal has reported from the front lines for the BBC since the 1980s,
gaining widespread recognition for his coverage of the Rwandan
genocide in 1994.
In a statement, a BBC spokesperson said he had been dealing with
the condition privately for several years
and is receiving professional medical advice.
I went to Rwanda as somebody thinking
that I knew what war looked like.
And I very quickly realised that genocide,
the attempt to wipe out a whole group of people,
was something very different.
I found myself having nightmares, flashbacks,
and then trying to deal with that,
not by going to therapy, but with booze.
I kept going to the war zones,
trying to cure it with drinking.
Part of me was driven by idealism.
I believe that journalism could, could help to change things.
But there was another part which is ego.
I wanted to be seen, I wanted to win awards
and I was also gradually becoming addicted
to the adrenaline of war coverage.
The first place that I immersed myself in that combination
was in Northern Ireland.
Robert Seymour was standing in this shop
when two men chased him outside.
There, he was shot a number of times in the head and chest.
Robert Seymour had strong connections with the outlawed
Ulster Volunteer Force.
In 1983, he was convicted of sectarian murder
in the Bennett supergrass case.
And so that was the beginning, for me, of long immersion
in the suffering of others.
MALE PRESENTER: I suppose Fergal Keane,
the acclaimed BBC war correspondent,
was almost guaranteed to be born with the gift of the gab.
He's the son of a renowned actor, Eamonn Keane,
and with the playwright John B Keane for an uncle,
the world of words and the art of communication
has been woven deep into his DNA.
His sometimes emotive and often harrowing reports
from world conflict zones such as Rwanda, South Africa and Kosovo
have gained him many awards,
including an OBE for services to journalism.
He's also battled successfully against alcoholism
and has just recently vowed never to return again to the war zones.
This is Milltown Cemetery
and where a lot of Nationalist and Republican people
who were killed during the Troubles are buried.
It's also a place...
..that I associate with the most chaotic and, for me,
tense and dangerous week of my experience of the Troubles.
ARCHIVE: The funeral procession entered Milltown Cemetery,
many thousands strong.
Unknown to them, a man had infiltrated them.
He threw his first grenade.
LOUD EXPLOSION
Many of the crowd gave chase across the cemetery in hot pursuit
of a man who paused, turned, and threw more grenades.
What happened here and all of the events that followed it
just brought home to me, living in Belfast,
how close you could get to the edge.
But also it was one of those moments, you know, when trauma
broke the surface. But the truth is, it was there all the time
and you couldn't live here and not feel it, not absorb it.
But it was only much later that I realised, you know,
how much of it I was taking in.
But nothing anybody could have said to me at that time
would have stopped me.
Had they come along and said, you know, in 30 years' time, mate,
you're going to be going in to hospital with a mental breakdown
from trauma, I wouldn't have believed them.
But you have to put yourself into my head in my 20s,
and that was somebody who suddenly felt this sense of purpose...
..about what he was doing, you know, because I think we all want
to be told that we're worthwhile, that what we do is worthwhile.
But I wanted it more than most.
And that's a consequence, of course...
..of not feeling that as a child.
I had the trauma of loving an alcoholic dad.
As long as I can remember, I've been afraid.
I was very afraid as a small child.
I lived in a house with an alcoholic parent.
And that meant, for me, an atmosphere of threat and of fear,
constantly wondering what was coming next?
Never being able to be certain that you were secure.
And I look back and think, childhood prepared me
for being in situations of risk.
For being in situations where I needed to read other people's
body language, and that's an amazing preparation if your later life
is going to be working as a reporter in conflict zones.
ARCHIVE: In the immediate aftermath, panic and fear.
It was here near a busy rail station that the worst devastation occurred.
The bombing left more than 50 people injured,
nearly all of them were civilians.
Most of the people who died here today, whose bodies still lie
on the ground behind me, were ordinary people.
They had no part in Sri Lanka's war.
PRESENT DAY: The thing was that we were all aware of trauma,
those of us who covered conflict.
But it took a surprisingly long time for me to be actually diagnosed.
I came to a point where I crashed.
I was in a place of absolute despair
and fear.
You can't inflict that on the people around you.
You need professional help.
And I just, I was too tired to feel ashamed
about being admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
I'm at home at the moment, and I am waiting to meet Dr Niall Campbell,
who is, like, one of the, the single most important people in my life
because it was he who first diagnosed me
with PTSD 13 years ago.
This is actually my last couple of weeks in this place,
so I'm moving in...
Moving to a new place, but not far from here. In Barnes.
Yeah, very close by.
When I rocked up at The Priory
to see you in March 2008,
how were you able to make that diagnosis, that it was PTSD?
Well, when you see genuine PTSD
it's very, very characteristic.
There's three areas of symptoms in PTSD.
First of all, as in the title, you need the trauma,
you need to have had a trauma.
And then there's the intrusive memories... Tick.
..where you remember the bad thing that happened.
You have dreams relating to the memories. Also.
You have flashbacks, you think you are back in the situation.
And then there's the distresser reminders, if it's on the news,
or somebody mentions the thing, it brings it all back again.
The avoidance symptoms, where you avoid talking about it, you avoid
thinking about it, and then there's the arousal symptoms -
people feel jittery, edgy, can't sleep.
As a condition, it was only invented in 1978.
It was first called that. It had many other names before. Shellshock.
All that sort of thing.
Yeah, battle exhaustion, etc.
Is this a wise thing for me to be doing? Yes, it is.
You always wanted to do a documentary about this sometime.
The danger, of course, that it opens up stuff and makes you think
about things, and you get reminded, but you've got help.
You know what to do if you've got a problem.
DRAMATIC MUSIC
The trauma of war is as old as war itself,
but it's only in the modern age that we've begun to treat
the mental scars of battle as an illness.
One of the most harrowing documentaries I've watched
is by the Hollywood director John Huston, who filmed traumatised
World War II veterans trying to adjust to civilian life.
COMMENTARY: This hospital is one of the many for the care and treatment
of the psychoneurotic soldier.
We're going back now, going back to Okinawa.
You can remember.
Tell me what you see.
Getting shells thrown at us.
You're getting shells thrown at you?
Yes, go on. You remember it now?
Tell me. It's all right now, but you can tell me.
Watch this guy, this poor guy, and you can see in him
what battle has done to him, and it's...
It's inside him, he's there, he's back in that place.
And, you know, you don't have to be, to be back there
in the sense of just seeing the same images,
but physically, you're back there.
For me, you know, a flashback or intrusive memory,
it's something that triggers cold sweat.
I mean, cold sweat and, like, shivering inside.
I'm not a pleasant person when I'm in it.
I am suspicious to the point of paranoia.
I'm angry.
I snap.
But when I'm in that zone,
people don't know what to expect.
I am aware of people tiptoeing around me.
I'm aware of them...
..being careful about what they say
so as not to provoke me.
It's shite.
It really is.
In many ways, it's the worst thing about this.
In 1990, I got the job I'd always wanted -
Southern Africa correspondent of the BBC.
And I arrived into a situation which was like a roller-coaster.
You had terrible violence taking place in the townships.
Horrific scenes.
ARCHIVE: For the second successive day, the people of these townships
are enduring what amounts to a state of siege.
At the same time, you had this sense that history was bringing Mandela
and black South Africa to the place where they always should have been,
the rulers of the country, black majority rulers.
Fergal, it must be a fantastic moment.
It is indeed, the party is in full swing
here at the Union Buildings in Pretoria.
Yes, how are you, ladies and gentlemen?
I don't see the ladies.
So to have a ringside seat on that was, on one level,
quite scary because of the violence,
but on another, it really lifted your spirits.
Then everything changed.
I went to Rwanda in the late spring of 1994
after getting a call from the BBC in London, asking me to present
a documentary on massacres that were taking place
in this tiny country 2,000 miles to the north.
I suppose I was flattered to be asked to go and do this
for Panorama. I was a radio reporter at the time.
Maybe my ego? Well, this is a great opportunity, go do it.
I'm just leaving Tanzania.
Ahead of me, the border with Rwanda,
the country where some of the worst crimes against humanity
of this century have been committed.
There's a sign over there which says, "Welcome to Rwanda".
But before you even set foot in the country, below me in the waters
of the Kagera River is stark evidence
of what's been happening here.
Evidence of Rwanda's journey into darkness.
What I witnessed there changed my life.
I encountered the worst of human cruelty
and the limits of my own courage.
Rwanda returns in nightmares, anxiety, a sense of failure
as a human being that helps to drive my PTSD.
For several years, I've tried to shut it out,
but I wonder if that stops healing?
PANORAMA THEME PLAYS
During the process of making this film,
I have had this feeling in my head, "This is not doing you good.
"This isn't helping you."
Because it's meant revisiting all kinds of anxieties
and nightmares.
And I feel that strongly today.
Yes, I've been advised to confront Rwanda,
but I'm...
..not looking forward to doing it. I really am not.
And today, I'm going to meet somebody I was in Rwanda with,
a really, really brave woman.
She and I have not spoken about what it was like to be there
25 and more years ago now.
And so I'm really apprehensive.
Good to see you.
Are you dreading this as much as I am? I am. OK, good.
We can do that together.
My heart's been beating all the way coming here.
It's all right. Yeah.
How are you? You're looking well.
I'm not bad. I'm not bad. And you too.
Yeah. Come on. Have a seat.
Cup of tea? Oh, yeah.
Let's get a cup of tea. Coffee? All right.
What's your first memory of the place? I don't know.
You could smell death, and that's all you can say. You...
You know, I'd covered South Africa, I'd covered the violence,
I'd seen, kind of, necklacing and you know, people dying
with burning tyres around them.
But Rwanda was on another scale.
Skulls in toilets.
you know, young bodies,
kids with scars, the kind of size of your hand,
they're just gaping wounds, and the kind of brutality
and the kind of visual remnants of it everywhere.
I had seen war before, had seen the face of cruelty,
but Nyarubuye belonged in a nightmare zone
where my capacity to understand, to rationalise, was overwhelmed.
The victims, all of them Tutsis, had gone to the church
in search of sanctuary.
Instead, the house of God became a killing ground.
I've never watched the film again.
I just didn't want to kind of go back there.
I understand that so well.
Those kids, I mean, for me, it was those kids
and those that were left behind and, you know,
the wounded that you saw along the road, and people with
arms chopped off or the kind of walking dead.
Yeah.
You know, and it kind of becomes a piece of history.
But when you've kind of lived that piece of history,
I don't think it ever leaves you.
And it's one day at a time.
And that I learned when I kind of, you know, in the space of
a very short time, I lost my husband,
my mother was on her deathbed,
and the child I'd given birth to
was kind of in intensive care and I was going to be burying him.
And I think that's the other thing, that's the selfishness on the part
of human beings, that it doesn't matter how much I saw in Rwanda,
it wasn't until it affected me, personally, in my own life
that I think that all of those levels of trauma
kind of came to the fore.
And I remember when I was sitting there with my son,
Rwanda came into my head.
I literally hugged him and I begged for his life.
And I just thought, those poor children, those orphans, you know,
who'd lost absolutely everything, everything.
You know. Yeah...
I mean, for somebody like you who's kind of gone through the worst,
you know, the depths of it with your drink and, you know,
points where I've seen you...
Hmm.
..I remember trying to broach it with you a number of times,
but you just couldn't deal with it.
It was always, oh, F-off, you know, where you just think,
how can this kind of human being, who's so together on some levels
and yet, on other levels is just like a complete...
Wreck? Yeah. F-up! Yeah. That's so true.
You know, and you've pulled through. I mean, for somebody to come
from a state of alcoholism
right to where you are now,
where you've been dry for what, over 20 years?
I mean, my God, if you can't pat yourself on the back for that,
Fergal...
Come on!
Come on, come on!
Come on. Yeah, yeah.
I expected that to be emotional and it was.
But I think in a, in a very positive way.
I do feel, though, if anything, it's made me realise just how much
work there is still to be done in terms of the Rwandan genocide,
and, er...
..and facing up to the emotions of that time.
For example, I can't even look at the full film
that we made back then.
And that's a kind of avoidance.
It's very, very...
..painful.
Would it be a good time
to talk about
your ways of coping... Drink? ..in those early days?
Yeah, yeah, let's go for it.
Yeah! Why not?
LAUGHTER
I remember...
..what it was like...
..to drink the first beer...
..and the phenomenal ease that spread through my body.
It was like somebody had let the air out.
HE EXHALES
And that was how I learned to medicate myself.
I was one of these highly-functioning alcoholics.
I had some of my greatest career success when I was still drinking.
But...
..I was a mess.
I was obviously suffering from PTSD, but it hadn't been diagnosed.
But what was bloody clear and didn't need expert diagnosis
was that my alcoholism was out of control.
And...
..I went into rehab.
It was life saving.
South Africa, but particularly Rwanda, won me prizes
and made me a name.
And the result of that was that the BBC gave me a plum job.
I was sent to Hong Kong to cover the last years of the British Empire
and the transition to Chinese rule.
ARCHIVE: The last rites of the British era have been performed.
The illuminations you see in the sky behind me
are a last gesture of farewell.
PRESENT DAY: And at a career level, I was flying high.
Inside...
..I was really starting to question
what I was doing, why I was doing it.
"My dear son, it is six o'clock in the morning
"on the island of Hong Kong.
"You are asleep, cradled in my left arm,
"and I am learning the art of one-handed typing.
"Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out.
"So much that seemed essential to me has, in the past few days,
"taken on a different colour.
"Like many foreign correspondents I know, I've lived a life
"that, on occasion, has veered close to the edge -
"war zones, natural disasters,
"darkness in all its shapes and forms."
The mystery is, why did I need to go back to it?
Why did I need to be in places where I would be terrified?
ARCHIVE: We followed US Special Forces and marines
conducting room-to-room searches.
Don't tell me it was a rational response to keep going back
to places that...where there was a chance of being killed.
ARCHIVE: These are survivors.
40 of their playmates are dead,
40 children hacked and speared by the militia.
PRESENT DAY: I wanted to go back again and again,
and I would find all kinds of rationale for doing it.
As we entered Qana, the sirens warned of a major tragedy.
It was vitally important that I tell the story.
It was important that I bear witness.
The UN escorted us into the territory worst hit by violence,
towards a village that has become notorious
for an atrocity committed by men loyal to Nkunda.
And of course, these were parts of the truth,
but not the whole truth.
Truth was, I couldn't stop.
The imam's son was among the dead, and behind the mosque,
we saw the shallow graves in which he and others had been buried.
Their clothes still lay scattered on the ground.
I was drawn to this, you know, like a moth to the flame.
In spite of the promises made to civilians that they will be
protected during time of war, for the people of Bint Jbeil
there was no protection at all.
Fergal Keane, BBC News, Bint Jbeil.
One of the things that's really struck me,
whether I'm covering a conflict in Central Africa
or in the Balkans or Ukraine,
is I keep asking myself,
what did the history do,
not just to the country, but to the minds of the people,
to their mentality?
Don't tell me it didn't affect them.
I've always been fascinated by history, and as I get older,
my own family history.
Scientists are researching possible historic family links to conditions
like depression and PTSD.
They call it transgenerational trauma.
I mean, I have to say that I'm never someone who has believed in history
as an alibi, so I behave in a certain way because my own lot
were treated appallingly or suffered terribly.
You know, for me, the essence of getting well is about my own
responsibility for where I am now.
But...
..it might help me to get better
to know how much of this
was shaped by the experiences of the past.
I'm thinking about what I carry, what we carry,
and I'm in a place which was devastated during the Great Famine
of the 19th century.
And which was then convulsed by a revolutionary war
and then by a civil war in which my grandmother
and other members of the family took part.
My grandmother would have been 19 or there or thereabouts when she became
embroiled in this conflict here in Listowel.
She grew up here and I used to come here on summer holidays,
and I remember a woman who was
vivacious, funny, extremely clever,
but who could also be struck
by the most debilitating
depressions and anxiety.
My grandmother, Hanna, was an extremely brave woman.
What I remember of her is the welcome, is the kindness.
Then moments, periods
when she would take to the bed
with what we in Ireland called, "the nerves".
Now myself, having been more than touched by a touch of the nerves,
God, I have such compassion for her.
And I'm lucky. You know, I live in an enlightened time, she didn't.
She lived in a time where it was whispered about,
and I wish she had lived
in more enlightened times.
That's all I can say.
She was greatly loved by her children and by her grandchildren.
But she had that loneliness that I know,
the loneliness of mental illness.
I think it's one thing to know that my grandmother
went through the horror of that war of insurgency,
the civil war that followed,
to know that her people before her
lived through the appalling trauma of the Great Famine and survived it.
But I have to ask, did that make any difference to me?
Has that shaped me in any way?
Can trauma be handed on?
And I'm going to go and see someone who I think
might have some answers to that.
He's someone I know and whose work I really respect,
one of the foremost practitioners and thinkers in this field,
the former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists,
Professor Simon Wessely.
Do you think that my great grandparents, for example,
are children of the family of the Irish famine,
my grandmother fought in the War of Independence,
does the fact that she experienced wartime trauma and then years later
is struck down with severe depression,
does it make it in any way more likely that I would?
Well... Experience these things?
The problem always here, though, is that
talking to a single person,
it's very difficult to make these kind of links.
But I can say over 1,000 people,
there will be links between a family history of trauma
and a person's chances of getting it, they are increased.
That's true. That does not mean that there's a one to one relationship
or anything even close to that.
Why did I get PTSD and other people I know...
..didn't get it? Other people who went through traumatic events?
Can you tell why?
It is incredibly difficult in any given individual to say
why this person got it, why you got it and your neighbour didn't.
What you can do, you can say, you can identify someone as being
at slightly higher risk, but we did a quite...
We did a natural experiment before the war in Iraq,
we screened all the British forces in Germany
and then the war in Iraq came.
That was nothing to do with us, but it just so happened
that we had just finished screening them all.
We kept the data. We then follow them all up and found out
who had had problems, who hadn't.
And we could predict some. Yes, we could.
But for everyone we got right, we got six wrong.
So that's six people whose lives we would have wrecked
because they wouldn't have been allowed to go to war,
or six journalists who had been told,
"You can't be a foreign correspondent",
and yet, they would have been very good
for one we'd correctly identified. Wow.
So that tells you the difficulties we face
when you ask me a question like that.
Nobody can say with certainty why some get PTSD and others don't.
But for those who do, fighting it alone can be painful.
I'm privileged.
I've had the support of my bosses, access to medication
and hospital care, and I've been in therapy for some years.
The PTSD that I've been diagnosed with,
complex PTSD,
essentially means...
..a trauma that arises
from witnessing multiple traumatic events.
So again, and again, and again, in my case.
It was around, I think, 2008, there or thereabouts,
when I was given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder.
And it was an incredibly important moment,
not because it, you know, gave me temporary relief
from what I was going through, but I formed a vital relationship.
I think one that has undoubtedly brought me to the place
where I'm able to say, no more war,
no more putting my mind
through what I've put it through.
How does it feel for you to be here at this place? Great.
I've only happy memories. Yeah, really? Happy?
Yeah, because, you know, I came in, whenever I've come in,
it's been in deep despair and panic. Mm-hm.
But, erm, I always felt safe.
I got sober here and...
..I started working with you.
One of the therapy techniques I practised with Cristina
is something called Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing,
or EMDR for short.
I found it helpful.
So EMDR is a technique that is based on research
done with the rapid eye movements, REM,
you probably have heard of that.
So, as you probably know, during the night
when we are sleeping, there are moments when our eyes move rapidly.
And there is research that shows that if you pair the
rapid eye movements with dreams,
very often the emotional content
of the dreams gets process, which means that then the person
feels better about it, which is what we want, in simple.
So the technique, it tries to replicate that
when the person is awake.
The way I understand it,
EMDR gives me a chance...
..to process painful images and memories.
And I guess, at its simplest, it's about taking pain out,
putting it into a place where I can live with it.
I'll give you an example.
Back in 2006, I was reporting from Lebanon when I was caught up
in a mortar attack.
They've just landed a shell right beside us.
As we raced away, another shell came in.
Hang on, hang on. SHARP BANG
We ran to help the wounded.
In the fear, we couldn't tell where the rounds were coming from. Fergal!
This is the panic of war.
Come on.
By late afternoon, a UN escort brought us and a huge number
of refugees safely back to Tyre. Just get in!
So do you think you'll be OK closing your eyes? Yeah.
The way I often do bilateral stimulation is by tapping
on your hands, like...
I'm going to start tapping now.
Cristina's method is by tapping me on my left and then on my right hand
to stimulate different sides of my brain, in the same way
that rapid eye movement does.
So if you can please close your eyes and tell me as much as you can
about what you see or maybe what you hear.
So we're, we're coming along...
..a flat, level piece of road. Mm-hm.
I hear the sound of explosion.
Another one. Mm-hm.
And we're suddenly next to a car that's been hit.
There's people, two guys sitting in the car and there's blood on them.
And we're saying to them, "Come on, let's go."
Sometimes EMDR does very little,
but sometimes it can be incredibly powerful.
And when I am in that zone, it's like being there.
It really is like being there.
And it's quite, it's quite a sensation
to just let it go free, go back into the memories
and see what comes.
I'm there in the, on the road and I'm thinking, "Jesus".
Yes? "We'll be killed any second now.
"They can shell us again." That's the moment, this is?
So first of all, are you feeling any emotion now as you recall this?
A bit of anxiety. OK.
If you will can rate it out of ten for me.
Ten is the maximum, zero is nothing.
Seven. Like a seven? That's, that's, that's quite high. OK.
So, remember, what the EMDR does is it tries to change that meaning,
it's like we remove that thought associated with this memory
and we want to install a different thought.
What different thought, alternative thought
would you like to have instead? I wasn't killed.
I survived. OK.
OK, so please go back to the memory, the moment when you thought
that you were going to be killed.
We got to the UN base with the Israelis still hitting vehicles,
and then we got back to the hotel and I remember thinking...
How does that feel?
Get through the gate. The relief. OK.
And I looked down, my hands were covered in blood.
The guy's blood.
OK, so let's continue from that moment, OK.
Take a deep breath, please. We had two thoughts.
The negative thought was, I'm going to die.
The alternative thought is, I survived.
Which one feels more true now? I survived. OK.
But now we have a different side to it. This is sadness, OK.
You want to stop? You want some water? It's OK. OK.
Go through it.
OK, take a deep breath, please.
What do you think about yourself right now?
Considering everything we did today.
That I have a way to go.
Still.
The feelings are still powerful, even after all these years.
All right.
And do you feel positive in that respect? Yeah.
Fuck, if I didn't, I'd be back on the front line or I'd be drinking.
OK. Yeah? Of course.
Quite a few times when I've come out of the EMDR sessions,
I'm just wiped out and drained.
It was like taking a bottle which has, you know,
sand or something in it or some kind of sediment and shaking it,
and it can take for days...
..for things to settle.
And I do feel, I have felt much clearer...
..lighter when it does settle.
I mean, what we do here can be incredibly emotionally draining.
I know. But I know that, you know,
it's demanding, demanding for you too.
But I just want to say something to you, which I would never normally
say in a therapy session.
And that's "Thank you", because I think you helped to save my life.
Thank you for saying it.
WHISPERING: It's the truth.
SOFTLY: Thank you.
I think EMDR has helped me beyond a shadow of a doubt,
but it's not a cure all.
Each individual needs a specific treatment, so we can't say one thing
is going to fix everything, but it's part of a kind of set of tools
that can be hugely beneficial for people like me.
One-to-one therapy with Cristina has helped me greatly,
but I'm also interested in seeing what can happen in group therapy
with PTSD sufferers.
Here in Northern Ireland, they've experienced some
of the highest rates of PTSD in the United Kingdom.
This whole journey for me isn't about languishing in the past,
you know, and looking at misery, it's about solutions now.
And I'm going to a place here in Belfast
where I think they've been doing something remarkable
to help people who've been through trauma.
How are you doing? How are you, Fergal?
How nice to meet you. Welcome to Wave. Thank you very much.
We want to go round the back to the garden...
Great. ..and have a seat.
I'm meeting trauma nurse Isabel Stewart of the Wave Therapy Centre,
who's going to introduce me to some people with PTSD.
They've been receiving treatment at Wave in Belfast
for a number of years.
My name's Liam. I was injured in 1999.
My name's Cathy. In 1990,
there was an IRA 1,000lb bomb
which was put under the road.
They detonated the bomb.
Two cars were almost parallel with each other.
One went one side of the road, one went in the other.
Three policemen and a nun were killed by that bomb
and I was a passenger with the nun.
My name's Peter
and September the 27th in 1979,
I was married at the time, had three young children.
It's my house there, just where he's passing.
It's amazing. It looks very normal.
I'm sitting playing with the baby and the doorbell rang.
Anne, my wife got up, no big deal,
to go and answer the door
and the next thing I heard her squeal, "Gunmen, gunmen."
The bullet hit me through the shoulder, down, hit the spine.
Tried to get up again, the legs wouldn't work.
I didn't know nothing about PTSD, nothing at the time.
But then something would come on the news and it'd be another
murder and I could see Anne's face.
I never forget it, it was as if she was a statue,
and then she would start to go and get a bottle of vodka.
The psychiatrist, he told me after her diagnosis, that she had PTSD,
and I remember going to doctors with Anne for treatment.
But they kept saying to me, "Oh, no, we have to deal
"with the alcohol problem before we look at THAT problem".
But she never had an addiction or a drink problem before the shooting.
And then...in 2006,
she said to me, "I'm going to bed, I don't feel well".
And when I went upstairs, Anne was dead in the bed.
Just...dead.
And, you know,
so, I'm sort of trapped in that image.
Can I, if, if you don't mind...? Go ahead.
I mean, it's humbling for me to sit with you all,
given what you've all gone through.
It's the first time I've ever sat among a group of people
like me, with PTSD. I've never, ever had that experience.
It's made me determined, I think,
to go back to London and try and find a group like this
because I've been battling this, you know...
Yeah, I go to my therapist and I talk to friends,
but I haven't been sitting with people like you who get it.
One of the regrets that I would have is I didn't discover
the Wave organisation until about 2009. Anne died in 2006.
I think talking to other women here would have been life-saving for her.
For me, coming to Wave was the first time I really felt
that I was with, like you're saying, like-minded people
who could understand that what I was going through wasn't insanity
for want of a better word.
It's important to get that diagnosis because a diagnosis is going to free
you up rather than tying you down.
When you name something, you take the fear away.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I was at a point, in my own mind, barking mad.
You know?
And going to a doctor who said, what's happening
is an entirely rational response
to terrible experiences.
That was like a liberation.
And to see you all, with all the struggles that you're going through,
you know, and you describe them so, so vividly and so well,
but you're all, you're all keeping going and you're confronting it,
you're doing something about it.
That really is...
It strikes me as the key to it. It's inspirational.
Yeah, it is. It is inspirational. Yeah.
Having to come to terms with a wheelchair is not easy,
believe you me. As I have said before, I'm looking,
used to be looking down on the baldy patches on men's heads.
Now I'm looking at big fat arses, you know what I mean?
LAUGHTER
The experiences that I've had and that they've had,
you know, they're obviously very different.
But there's just that great sense of being with people
who understand,
because the symptoms that we go through are really similar.
And I just felt liberated being among people who got it.
What's really becoming clear to me on this journey
is that you just have to keep pushing yourself,
not believing there's going to be one thing that cures you,
but maybe a series of essential encounters.
I hope I'm on my way to one of those now.
It's back into a place and events
that I've always feared -
Rwanda.
I haven't watched this film since 1994 when we made it.
And I feel I have to watch it
if I'm going to confront...
..the past.
I feel I can't keep avoiding the reality of it.
PROGRAMME: It destroys what it can no longer control
and everywhere, mutilation and death,
that which first you smell and then see, again and again.
In Rwanda, I was able to leave and, more than anywhere else,
it left me with a feeling that I failed as a human being
who saw great suffering and then got on a plane and went home,
back to my comfortable life.
Learning to live with PTSD means facing feelings about Rwanda
that I've suppressed.
I made a start meeting the documentary maker,
Rizu Hamid, earlier.
Now I'm going a step further to meet someone who came from hell
to a very changed life.
Beata was a kid.
She was very young, so it was during the genocide.
She and other orphans were being taken out through the roadblocks
of the extremists.
And these roadblocks had been, you know, butcher zones.
Erm, it was that journey out, I'll never forget,
it was, it was just terrifying.
Every roadblock we stopped at they would open the door,
or the militia would, the Interahamwe, as they called them,
who'd climb up in and look at the kids.
You could see the terror on these children's faces
and Beata was one of them.
I'm not going there as a reporter to interview someone.
I'm going to someone who was there at that place at that time...
..and selfishly to see if she can help me.
It seems a lot, you know, from a...
..a journalist to ask of a survivor of genocide.
I think maybe it might be a way of confronting the past,
which is damaging.
I met Beata briefly ten years ago in London when she reached out
looking for information about the convoy.
Waiting.
Nervous? Yeah.
Welcome. Thank you.
Good to see you. Good to see you.
Yeah, long time. You've come. Yeah, got here. Come in.
Definitely.
Hey.
So this is the truck where I was in with my mother.
So this truck was, that was right in front of the vehicle I was in.
Because every time it stopped at a roadblock,
I could see the door would open, the militia would get up.
They'd look in,
and there you were.
Wow. Because it was supposed to be a convoy with small children,
we were not officially there.
Yeah. Because I was 15, my mother was an adult.
So we went in the back of the truck...
Blankets over your heads. Blankets over our heads
and we will ask the children to sit on us.
They hid you? Yes. The younger children hid you. Yes.
And were like four or five.
I remember them, but I didn't know you then.
I didn't even know you were hiding under this blanket. Hm.
Wow.
Beata, do you suffer...
..from trauma?
I don't think so.
You know, you lost people who were close to you in this genocide.
You were afraid for your life.
And yet, here you are, you're, you're remarkably together.
I was, I was frightened.
For sure, I was frightened, but I don't know.
I don't have an answer to your answer, because I know people,
survivors, who are traumatised, who live with trauma.
I think my mother still lives with trauma.
I was lucky when I arrived in France.
The family, the French family that welcomed me,
they immediately told me, you have to go and see a shrink.
So since then, I've been seeing shrinks
and I was lucky for that because I started taking care
of my mental health.
You know that word you hear people using, "closure,"
as if you can sort of deal with the, you know,
we'll deal with that trauma and now we close the door, it's gone.
It's closed, it's finished. It doesn't exist.
I don't think you can, like, remove it.
The sadness and the pain will always be there,
but there has to be a space for it
that doesn't take the whole space in your life.
I suppose the lesson that I get from you
is not to avoid it,
is to confront it, to face it.
You know, I like this idea of it's like a wild animal
that you're going to... Tame it. Yeah. Yes.
And then you're the one who is going to
invite the memory.
It's not invading you. You're inviting it.
Wow, OK.
But for that, you have to confront, I guess.
And not everybody can do it.
Beata is happily married with two sons
and now helps people with mental health issues.
You think of those who were killed and that you're still alive
and then you have to make this life full of...
..life and of joy and do that for those who are not there,
who are not there any more.
And you think of all the goodness because within that nightmare
and that chaos, there was still a little part of goodness
with those people who'd helped us, who'd saved us.
Just for them, we should be happy.
So that they didn't do that,
they didn't do that, that good for nothing.
Point taken.
I feel really, really tired,
emotionally drained, but I'm so glad I did it.
She's 18 years younger than me,
but she feels a lot wiser
and I think I can learn from
what she said to me particularly about, you know,
the need to make space, to not try and run away from the pain,
to make space for other things besides it, which you know,
can seem very self-evident and simple, but the thing about...
I was hearing that from a genocide survivor, you know.
Making this film is the hardest thing I've ever done
in journalism, apart from Rwanda.
Has it been worthwhile?
If it's worthwhile, if it helps some people,
if it shows them that you can have this,
learn to live with it and have a bloody life.
And know the most important thing of the lot,
you're not alone.
There's loads of us out there.
And we can have each other's backs.
Do you know that line from the Van Morrison song?
"Ain't it all worthwhile when the healing has begun."
Is that how you feel, Fergal? You think the healing has begun?
It does feel like the healing has begun.
Yeah, it does.
Dalo.
Come on, come on!
CLIVE MYRIE: Tonight at ten, we're live in Ukraine, a country at war.
A million people have now fled this country since the Russian
invasion began, almost all of them are women and children.
As Fergal Keane explains.
TRAIN WHISTLE BLASTS
They come from across the second biggest country in Europe
after Russia.
Saved by the railways that are this country's lifeline.
It is war in my city.
Children and I are scared of war,
I don't like war.
I flew home from Kyiv because I didn't want to be in a city
that was under bombardment or shelling.
I knew my nerves couldn't take that.
And so I decided to come here,
to Lviv in the far west
of the country to report on the refugee crisis.
I'm here because in the marrow of my bones,
I'm a reporter and war is my subject,
and I know it's damaged me.
For years and years.
And I rationalise it by saying, well, there's no bombing
and shelling here, this is where people are coming for sanctuary.
But I am listening to stories of trauma every day and I don't feel
I have a right to talk about trauma when I look at the magnitude
of what people are going through here.
One of the things that I've learned through therapy for PTSD
is detachment.
Doesn't mean I'm a robot, course I'm not,
but I have been able to detach.
But this is a struggle inside me.
This is going on inside me.
It's not finished...
..the story of me and PTSD.
Someday it will be
and, I hope, in a positive way.
But in the meantime, here I am.