ABC’s James Longman on Family, Trauma, and Reporting from the Frontlines (Part 1)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.

I'm producer Mia Cirenti. On the show today, ABC News chief international correspondent James Longman. Having reported from over 60 countries, from the front lines of war in Ukraine and Syria to the wilds of the Antarctic, James has witnessed the extremes of human existence firsthand. But the story that has stayed with him the longest is closer to home. In his new memoir, The Inherited Mind,

James applies his journalistic skills to explore a family legacy marked by mental illness and the science and people that shape us. James was just a preteen at boarding school when his father, who struggled with depression and schizophrenia, ended his own life.

As James grew older, his own battles with depression led him to examine how his father's mental health might have influenced his own. Drawing on conversations with leading experts, he delves into the science of inheritance, the impact of environment on genetic predispositions, and how one can overcome a familial history of mental illness and trauma. James joined us recently on stage at the Kiln Theatre in London for a powerful discussion on family, resilience, and frontline reporting.

He was joining conversation with longtime friend, barrister, and broadcaster, Rob Rinder. This episode is coming to you in two parts. If you want to listen to the live recording in full and ad-free, why not consider becoming an Intelligence Squared premium subscriber? Head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership to find out more, or hit the IQ2 extra button on Apple. But now, let's join our host, Rob Rinder, with more. Thank you.

Good evening, everybody, and thank you all for coming. It is a real gift and privilege to be here, to talk to somebody I don't just admire, but I'm gifted to call a friend and to share with you alongside him a truly profound and beautiful work that I

have been on the front line of in its creation. Welcome to this Intelligence Squared event, James Longman, Family Trauma and Reporting from the Front Lines. I'm delighted to introduce this man alongside me tonight, James Longman, Chief International Correspondent for ABC News. He's won news Emmys for his reporting on the climate crisis and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

A David Bloom Award for his reporting on LGBTQ+ abuses in Chechnya. Vital reporting that, if you have a moment to find, is so worth experiencing. Early in his career, James served as Beirut correspondent for the BBC and began his career as a freelance journalist in Syria, where he reported undercover for British newspapers. The story of how that happened is a novel in of itself.

But the story that stayed with James the longest, perhaps, and is closer to home, is what we'll be discussing today. James's new beautiful memoir, The Inherited Mind, a story of family hope and the genetics of mental illness.

This has been championed by a number of people in this side of the pond and beyond, but I can't put it better than either Dr. Jennifer Ashton or Anderson Cooper or somebody who some of you may have heard of, the brilliant Diane Sawyer, who says that James is, or this book is, an inspiration for those who have ever asked, who am I and what can I become? Everybody, James Longman.

We're going to start because this is a beautiful and complex work. But perhaps at the beginning, just if you can, imagine the scene. It's going live. You haven't got long to tell us the story of your family and what inspired you to write this book. Well, that introduction was amazing. I've never had an introduction like that in my life. I have to take Rob absolutely everywhere with me.

I always knew that I was going to write this book. It just was the thing I was going to write. And because, you know, the story of my family and my upbringing really just turned me into the person I am. And that's an obvious thing to say, but you know,

Losing my dad when I was young, what it did to my family, it made me into someone who just wanted to really escape for most of his life and end up as a journalist. So it really was important to me to find out what was going on in my family. For those of you who've not read the book,

It's based on my early life and growing up in a family where my father had schizophrenia and he ended his life when I was nine years old. His brother also had schizophrenia. My grandfather also ended his life and my mother has clinical depression. And so when I was in my early twenties, I started to get my own sadness, my own depression.

When I came out of it, I asked myself, "Was this written in my code? Was this meant to happen? Was this just predestined? If it is, what's going on?" The book is a product of years of study, of speaking to the specialists, of the geneticists, neuroscientists who've been doing the work, to really understand on a much more granular, biological level, what's actually happening in our bodies.

But there's a deeper mission in the book for others as well, which we will come to in due course. There's a curious other element alongside this shadow and the complexity of this inherited mind of yours. You've placed yourself in mortal danger. You've had a career reporting from the front lines.

So I wonder if you can perhaps share with us how your career has affected your mental health. And at the same time, because I promised the audience and I don't want to let them down, tell us that story about how it was you ended up reporting for the BBC in Syria. Perhaps it will give us some insight into who you are. I became a journalist because I was fundamentally interested in

going to other parts of the world to see how people live, but also how they experience some of the most appalling things that can happen in the world. And I always say, I didn't, I go and do a lot of traumatic things. I did not become a journalist to depress people.

And a lot of you watching here tonight, you know, you will have heard and you may have said, oh, I don't watch the news. It's really sad. What I tried very, very hard to do is to try to give people some hope, you know, because the world is a big, scary place and it is, it can be very traumatic and sad. And for me, my attraction was to go and experience and have my feelings activated. I really feel powerfully that if I'm in a place where something awful is happening,

I can live and experience it with those people. And somehow that feels right to me. Feeling sadness when I first started reporting in Syria somehow felt like it was right to be near, to be close to sadness. Did you need to be...

that close to death or existential threat to feel those things? Honestly, I didn't have any idea what I was doing. I put myself into loads of danger like a complete idiot. Just to be clear, you didn't just get a job reporting as an international correspondent. How did you get into Syria before you were even a reporter? I did a degree in Arabic and I lived in Syria as part of it.

Then, when the war began, I was in the right place at the right time. A friend said, "You know there are no other journalists, like no journalists are allowed in Syria. You could probably maybe write for some newspapers." So I did. I found myself in parts of... If you remember, in 2011, there was the protest movement, which became the civil war. Most recently, that war bubbled up again and Bashar al-Assad was toppled.

And I found myself at 24 years old, sitting in front of a man whose son had been shot dead in front of him. He had been out in the street and security forces had come and they had sort of sprayed into the crowd. And this bullet had gone through his shoulder and into the head of his son.

I remember sitting, it was at night, I was led through to this house. It was in a place called Rastan in Syria. Everyone parted. I sat down in front of this man and he told me this story. I just sat there completely crippled by shame because I felt, "Why are you telling me? I'm this 24-year-old child. You need a real journalist, not some kid who's trying to be a journalist." He told me his story. I went away.

Wrote about it. I sent it to the newspaper someone on the news desk who could actually write rewrote what I most of what I wrote but that ended up in the front on the front page of the times of the section of the foreign the foreign section of the times and I realized actually

it was worth it. It was worth his time telling me that, and it was worth me being there. And you have this incredibly naive sense that you're going to change the world as a journalist. And you know, that's just not true, but for this man in that moment, it meant something. And, um, and that's what I re then I think I started to realize actually this could be something for me

I won't go on forever, but it was a strange full circle moment last month. I was back in Syria as Assad was toppled. And I met a man in a morgue whose son had been killed by Assad. And he was killed two months before the revolution. So he missed out on freedom by two months.

But I remember standing there with this man and thinking, "Wow, 13 years ago, I was in this country with a father who'd lost his son to Assad. And here I am again, all these years later, with the same thing happening." I just felt really lucky that I was able to be there for that moment and to be there to experience these things alongside Syrians. I became a journalist because of Syria, because I fell in love with the country. But I think I also became a journalist because

I fell in love with the feeling it gives you because your human feelings are being activated. And as your career has grown, you haven't lost that thirst and love that you have to connect with people and share those stories with others.

It's interesting hearing you, for yourself, but also that we might learn those stories and connect in some way. Which is at the epicenter of this work, this extraordinary work, where you're both objective as a reporter at the same time it's happening to you and you want us to learn something from it. In each of these chapters there's something of deep and profound value.

I wonder if we start at the beginning on page 21. By the way, Rob was instrumental in a lot of this. We were walking around the park near where he lives. Well, I had some of these ideas percolating and Rob's immense wisdom was helping me along the way in various stages. So, just because he won't tell you that, I'm telling you that. I think it's fair to say I did some window dressing. That's it. This is an exquisite book and as ever, I did the hair and makeup. But...

But what's fascinating is, I left it till late to read the final draft. I'm overwhelmed by what you've achieved here. "The impact of my father's death and his absence from my life has obviously been profound. For much of my life, I simply told people he died in a fire, avoiding any further questions that I would find difficult. But there was always secrecy around the incident."

conversations about trauma and about shame surrounding suicide you deal with is such depth and intellectual emotional and for my money spiritual clarity - can you help us understand that my mom tried to protect me very deeply from what happened in my family my father had Schizophrenia when she met him they broke up he came back He'd been in and out of psychiatric care at the time he then

Three eight years after I was born ended his life and for her she was worried about this Intergenerational repetition of trauma so it was hidden from me even though the kind of trauma and the emotion of what had happened was did reverberate in our lives and it ended up destroying the relationship I have with my mother. Thankfully, it's a bit better now, but it really has been difficult and

And in my dad's family, there was no way anyone would talk about these things. He had had schizophrenia, his brother. And my grandmother was just not... You should picture her as a bit like the late queen. She was kind of very proper. My dad's first girlfriend actually described her a bit like Judi Dench. She was kind of very sort of pastel-y and sweet. But you would...

I imagine Judi Dench would have quite a deep conversation about these things. My grandmother would never have had that. So I just carried with me this really looming shadow of major trauma that had happened in my family. No one was quite willing to tell me what had really happened. I always remember I was at the funeral, my father's funeral, and I was sitting at the front. I remember looking up and seeing my aunt, my dad's, my uncle's wife. She read a poem about how

John was finally free. And I remember sitting there thinking, what does that mean? Why would you say that at a funeral? It's not a good thing that he died. Um, and I only really found out why much later. And it wasn't like my mom sat me down and told me my relationship with her fell apart. She told me in a fight that he had killed himself and that, you know, it was basically, you know, your father killed yourself. You're going to end up killing yourself just like him. And I, I,

I then worried that that's in fact what was going to happen. The book opens with the idea of the Longman curse, which is what my mother says. She's half Lebanese. And again, in the book, Idina Monsoon, if you've seen Absolutely Fabulous, you'll know that character. Not dissimilar in real life. And Rob knows her. Yeah, Rob knows her. So she'll sort of say, darling, on my birthday, she'll say, darling, it's my birthday. I gave birth to you. When you have a child, it'll be your birthday. Yeah.

And that's actually a direct quote from Ab Fab. And she doesn't know that. So she has this kind of hyperbolic, kind of dramatic flair. And so she said, darling, you have the Longman curse. You're cursed and I must save you. And so I was interested in delving into why I'd internalized that idea if indeed she had put her finger on something.

why it is that when our parents tell us things, they are true immediately.

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Shop blinds.com right now and get up to 45% off select styles. Rules and restrictions may apply. There's another element here, which is that suicidality is, we know there is, if not inherited as part of your journey and your scientific and intellectual quest, it does repeat itself in families. And what's fascinating here is that you use your reporting mind and also your

all of the depth of your emotional intelligence to go, Dara said, on the journey to discover whether the Longman curse is real.

There's a moment when you start going into all of the scientific notes like a true Under come on undercover investigative journalists reading through these notes you say is a strange experience No one would normally be able to access personal information about their parents. It feels like I'm prying into details I was never meant to read but there are things in here that feel huge gaps in the timeline of my father's life and

That's the first moment that the book sets off. I wonder if you can help us share, if you like, how that felt. I had had this information that he had schizophrenia. I had this information that he'd killed himself, but really nothing else. I knew that he had set fire to his home. It was only when I was 26 I found out that he had also thrown himself from the building.

There's what happens in a family, and then there's what people say happened. That supersedes the truth. You end up with this law that actually ends up becoming more powerful. I wanted to go back to facts. I was amazed to get 140 pages of his medical records. I spent a long time emailing the NHS. Any of you who've come into contact with the NHS, I'd leave it up to you to imagine what it's like emailing with them.

It was a long process. But eventually, someone actually did. An amazing person at the NHS found 140 pages. It was his admissions into psychiatric care from the 1970s, the drugs he was on, the people who looked after him, his therapy notes. It was incredibly revealing. I read the words that came out of his mouth when he was in psychosis. It was upsetting because

I realized for the first time what the reality of schizophrenia was. He really believed these things that were happening, that his body was on fire. He would describe bugs crawling across his body. At one point, he asked a doctor to inject him with drugs until I am dead and then cut my head off to make sure that I am truly dead.

Just extraordinary things to read that your father said. But I was happy to read it. I wasn't happy. I wonder if you know, while you're speaking, it's happening to me, I wonder whether this is true of the audience, you're able to communicate something so deeply horrifying with the degree of a reporter's emotional detachment. I wonder if you experience that. I'm gasped, just as everybody else did, having read it, but...

That's fascinating to me. As you were looking at those notes, were you a son or were you a reporter? Yeah, I was definitely a reporter first. The book, I wanted above all for it to be good.

Rob's written some very good books, but there are lots of books that are not very good. I wanted to make sure that it was. I didn't want to write rubbish. I didn't want it to be cashing trauma chips to make money and to become something. I wanted it to be good. In my work, in this, when I meet someone who's lost their whole family to

Russian soldiers or a bomb has wiped their house out or whatever I'm doing, someone's been murdered in a terror attack, I have to put my emotion to one side because it's really important that I get the information and I find out the truth. And that's what I was doing with these notes. You're also looking for facts and you speak to the best people. And in the next two chapters, schizophrenia, not just one thing, you speak to experts and then

a chapter, " What Does It Feel Like?" Perhaps connects with a lot of people here. I read this chapter a couple of times. Myself had to put it down. The first chapter, you say this, "What I hope you've seen in this chapter, having spoken to experts, is

Something very simple. Schizophrenia is much more than you might imagine it to be. It's not a simple condition plagued by paranoia, hallucinations, or any of the other stereotypical, often exaggerated tropes from movies. Yes, it can be all of these things, but the people who live with it often do so despite hurdles that those with other illnesses would never endure. Then in the next chapter, a moment of pause. "'I'll be honest with you,' says James. "'I had to stop work on this book for a while to get my head straight.'"

to simply regain some energy. But since returning to it, learning about some of the latest science around recovery from depression has really given me new hope. Can you tell us about those discoveries and about speaking to scientists and how that helped? Well, yes. It was really important that the book wasn't just a story about my family. It was actually important to talk to other people. There were people who experienced these illnesses who I interviewed for the book.

to find out more about what they do in their lives to overcome their conditions. For me, some of the most exciting stuff is around the genetic research that's being done, which will better tailor the medication that's available to people.

I'm not a pharmaceutical professional, I'm not trying to sell you drugs, but I'm here to tell you that antidepressants work. They work for me. It made me really hopeful to know that there's genetic research going on at the moment, which will mean that when you go to a doctor and you say that you're feeling depressive symptoms,

They don't just assume that you have depression. They might be able to take a skin sample or a blood sample and run it to see what kind of antidepressant will work best for you according to your genetic makeup. It is possible currently for things like hepatitis, and it will be possible in the next five years or so for things like antidepressants. So I think that's very hopeful. I mean, you go into the world of epigenetics and it's fascinating. And

what is otherwise incredibly complex as part of how you stand on the front line and explain the inexplicable in a way that's relatable and above all else that anybody can learn from. You do it with such piercing clarity. But you also do present the other point of view from the one that you've just shared. For example, Dr. John Reed, who believes that psychoanalysis is preferable to treatment of drugs. This is not a book that's about preaching.

But I am fascinated by your interest in genetics and what you learned from it and what we should walk away from in terms of thinking about mental health and some hope. Yeah, so most people when they think about the genetics of illness will have heard of the 60/40 dynamic. 60% environment, 40% genetics. It's somehow a simple question of attraction or subtraction, a simple equation. One plus one equals you will have a mental illness.

This book explores epigenetics, which is how that interplay functions. 2% of our genes is the hardware. It's the helix. It's the code that we inherit, the pairs of chromosomes from each of our parents. You will not be able to do anything to change that. That is the code you get. There has been incredible science done on the number of genetic variants that are inherited that can be tracked for things like depression, bipolar disorder, and schizophrenia.

But the 98% is not the hardware, it's the software. It's how those genes are activated. It's how those genes are either basically turned up or turned down. There is something you can do in your life. You have agency over that 98%. What is even more incredible is -- and this is the work of Rachel Yehuda and others who've done work on inherited trauma -- she says very clearly,

If you can inherit trauma, you can inherit healing. I can give my children the capacity, if I have them, to overcome whatever genetic predispositions I might be giving them. I think that's a tremendous thing to know. It's an enormously successful and beautiful part of the writing. I really do urge anybody to read it. It brings together such

complex papers in a way that was the first time I've read a lot about epigenetics. I finally had my aha moment thanks to this book. The next part of the book, from having spoken to the objectivity, excuse me, being alongside the objectivity of science, which as I say, you share with such reachable understanding of

becomes personal. And I must confess, this is a bit where I cried several times. Family life and growing up fast, relationship with your mom, and in my mother's words, an extraordinary thing that you decided to do. I'm just going to read a little part from family life and growing up fast. My mother was and still is like a lioness when it comes to what she sees as her role to protect me.

After my father died, though, her eccentricity turned into a deeper instability and her sadness fueled heavier and heavier drinking. It has been a complex and nuanced relationship. That's the euphemism to be sure. And despite that challenge, there was a decision you made to ask her to write your dad's story from her perspective. Share with us if you can help us understand why you did that, what you expected to happen and what the outcome was.

There are so many different versions of events, right? People say that, you know, they'll have what they think happened and they'll believe that's the truth. And for me, you know, it was really important to get my dad's notes, what the doctors say happened, to speak to his carers, to hear what he thinks because they had his words in the notes and his voice, but also the woman who lived with him for so long. And it can't just be my version of events. I had to go to her to ask her. She is, was an massively integral part of my life.

So I went to ask her if she would write a chapter. She goes, darling, of course, I've been writing a book for years. Of course I'll write a chapter. I'm like, well, if you could take some of the time out of your very busy schedule to write perhaps a chapter for me, she did. And she, it was extraordinary because I was, I remember I was sitting in, I think it was in Ukraine and I got the, she's not wildly technically efficient. So I got quite a lot of emails in various different, um,

fonts and in the wrong order. It was like Windings or something. She sent it to me and I was transposing it and putting it into the Word document. I didn't know any of what she was telling me.

I didn't know about their courtship. I didn't know how they met. They met in South Kent, I think in the 1970s at a party. I didn't know that he had left and gone into psychiatric care and come back six years later. I didn't know that three months after I was born, he tried to end his life and she was in the hospital with me while trying to save him.

It really put into massively important context why she is the way she is now. It's helped me deal with our relationship. She transposed her efforts to fix him onto me, I think. I'm an only child and she doesn't have anybody else. I was amazed by...

by what she wrote and I'm really deeply grateful that she did it. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This was produced by myself, Mia Cirenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. Don't forget, Intelligence Squared Premium subscribers can listen to the event in full and ad-free. Head to intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership to find out more or hit the IQ2 extra button on Apple for a free trial.

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