Mac McClelland is a human rights reporter and a sometime denizen of crisis zones and an award winner for doing the former in the latter. She’s shadowed war criminals and revealed despicable labor practices. [...] she’s a complete mess. In her new memoir, “Irritable Hearts: A PTSD Love Story,” McClelland pulls back a dark, heavy curtain on the costs paid by those who travel to the far corners of the planet to gather difficult news on difficult subjects — much the same as the costs paid by armed men who travel thousands of miles to kill, and civilians who run from armed men and are beaten or raped or killed by them if they don’t run quickly enough. It dawned on me, while reading “Irritable Hearts,” that I’ve now been immersed in stories of trauma for much of the past 15 years: atrocity survivors, soldiers, guerrillas, war criminals, torture victims, aid workers, refugees, fellow journalists. To get this review in on time, I found myself reading “Irritable Hearts” after spending a day interviewing war victims in a United Nations camp for internally displaced people in Africa. I’d spent the day wading through other peoples’ pain, but it was McClelland’s book that did this to me. [...] I mean that in the best possible way. There’s a good deal of sobbing, disturbing dreams, waking terrors, flashbacks, recurring emotional numbness, breakdowns, excessive drinking, thoughts of self-harm, and sexual fantasies and dysfunction — perhaps so much that her editor should have leaned harder on the red pen — especially with all the play-by-play on the travails of treatment, including a state-certified psychiatric evaluation delving into past traumas that ultimately finds McClelland “severely impaired,” and all of it wrapped around a seemingly misbegotten romance with, if you can believe it, a French gendarme. Throughout, McClelland focuses her ample investigative skills on unpacking her own PTSD and on explorations of the nature of the disorder and the effectiveness of its various treatments that are by turns thoughtful, poignant and provocative. McClelland also shines much-needed light on the added difficulties of being an unaccompanied “lady-reporter,” which female readers will no doubt simply recognize as the everyday burden of living in a world in which sexual harassment and sexual assault by men is endemic. An article about using violent sex to treat her PTSD led to a deluge of criticism — and much personal anguish — but it also made an impact on a swath of readers who wrote to her about how much the piece helped them make sense of their own struggles with trauma. “Had I any sort of cultural or professional knowledge about trauma, I might’ve known that the conditions of my assignments were risk factors for journalists’ developing PTSD: the number of traumatic assignments, and the height of their intensity, and low perceived social support and high organizational stress,” she writes.

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