Depression and #ReasonsToStayAlive
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Hi, welcome to All in the Mind, Lynne Malcolm with you, and today, depression, and how to feel more alive.
Readings from Reasons to Stay Alive:
Be gentle with yourself. Work less; sleep more.
Listen more than you talk.
Look at the sky, remind yourself of the cosmos. Seek vastness at every opportunity in order to see the smallness of yourself.
Be aware that you are breathing.
Be kind.
Understand that thoughts are thoughts. If they are unreasonable, reason with them, even if you have no reason left. You are the observer of your mind, not its victim.
Lynne Malcolm: These are just a few of the pieces of advice writer Matt Haig has given himself since he hit rock bottom as a young man.
At the age of 24 Matt Haig's world fell apart, and he couldn't see a way to go on. He's now the author of eight novels, including his bestselling The Humans, and three children's books. However, he was blown away by the reaction to his latest book, Reasons to Stay Alive, which is a memoir of his own emergence from chronic depression and anxiety. The book grew from a blog, and the Twitter-sphere exploded when Stephen Fry tweeted: 'The short book that Matt Haig has written is the best I have ever read on coping with depression. It is so RIGHT.'
It looks like a simple self-help book; it's that, but so much more.
Matt Haig, where did it all start?
Matt Haig: Well, it felt like it was from out of nowhere. I was 24 years old. We were living on the Spanish island of Ibiza, I was the sort of young man who didn't really want to grow up, like lots of young men, so there were all sort of going on; drink, a bit of drugs, lots of late nights, lots of heavy living. I was averagely irresponsible, I suppose, and I'd had a winter of very depressing jobs that only lasted about a month, and I was going back to more of the same that winter. And about two weeks before I was about to fly home, during a not very unhealthy patch, actually, I'd been running on the morning I became ill, but from out of nowhere about 11 in the morning my heart just started to race and then my brain was sort of…all sorts of strange sensations were happening inside my brain.
And it was basically a panic attack, but it was a panic attack that didn't end. You think of a panic attack as ten minutes and you get over it, or you breathe into a brown paper bag and someone tells you to go for a walk and you calm down. This just didn't end. There was no way of ending it, it was too much. And I was like that for about a week. And when that was over, when the adrenaline had run out, I was in this sort of new reality which I didn't really know had a medical term, because at the time it sounds so melodramatic but at the time I literally thought no-one had felt like this on earth before. Which is ironically a very common feeling of depression, because it's nothing like you've ever experienced, so you therefore think no-one else has experienced it.
And it was a long time before I realised what I was suffering from, and it was a very, very scary and alienating thing. And while we were still in Spain, we were living by these beautiful limestone cliffs next to the Mediterranean, I wanted to throw myself off a cliff, literally. I obviously didn't do that, but it was close. And the reason that was, wasn't because I'd suddenly had a death wish or thought life wasn't worth it, it was literally a state of panic. It was like being trapped. So it was like being in a burning building and wanting to jump out of the window. It wasn't like suddenly, 'Oh yes, I love jumping out of windows,' it was just that I didn't know how to cope with the other alternative.
Lynne Malcolm: And it wasn't actually that you wanted to die.
Matt Haig: No, it wasn't. It sounds so strange. The fear of death and the horror of death remains exactly the same. The only different thing is that the pain and terror of living has rapidly increased. So while I totally believe suicide is a preventable thing, and we can see this from the fact that the rates of suicide vary so much between genders, between ages, between nations, between different cultures, so I do think, although depression is a universal thing, suicide is preventable. But I also think we need to sort of take away the language of judgment. You see it all the time, every time a celebrity or someone takes their own life and people say 'how could he do it', you know, 'he had so much money' or 'had so many things going for him' or 'he was weak'…until you know that level of invisible pain, with all the will in the world you don't necessarily know what you're talking about.
Reading from Reasons to Stay Alive:
Self-help:
How to stop time: kiss.
How to travel in time: read.
How to escape time: music.
How to feel time: write.
How to release time: breathe.
Lynne Malcolm: One of the ways in which you describe depression is really interesting and has a lot of depth, and it's not just about being sad. One of the things you talk about is the relationship between feeling depressed and your relationship with time.
Matt Haig: Yes. Well, it's the biggest cliché in the world, isn't it, time heals things. But really the one thing bigger than depression is time. And the way time helps is because it disproves depression. What I mean by that is depression gives you a very, very…the bleakest world view imaginable. So it convinced me I wasn't going to be alive to see my 25th birthday. It totally convinced me I'd never have a sort of successful long-term relationship, I'd never have kids, I'd never do these things, I'd never have a job, I'd never be worth anything. And, you know, you live to see 25, you live to see 30. And this year I'm going to be 40. Every time, you disprove depression. The next time a bout of depression happens you've got a little bit of armoury. There's no foolproof solution but you can rationalise with yourself more. Whereas the first time it happens you actually believe that stuff. You know, people will tell you it's going to be all right, but you don't necessarily believe them, because they don't know.
Lynne Malcolm: And you've also said that depression lies.
Matt Haig: Yes, depression lies. And it's very hard to not believe it when it's there, because it's very much in the foreground and it totally convinces you. And it's not always that it necessarily lies, but it gives you the very, very worst interpretation of your reality. Yes, so I think time proves that life doesn't always get worse. And also very few things get worse than wanting to jump off a cliff, you know. You're kind of at rock bottom by definition of being suicidal. So it's almost ridiculous that depression says everything's going to get worse from there, because very few things get worse from there. You can have horrendously bad days that aren't as bad as wanting to jump off a cliff, so…
Reading from Reasons to Stay Alive:
A conversation across time:
THEN ME: I want to die.
NOW ME: Well, you aren't going to.
THEN ME: That is terrible.
NOW ME: No. It is wonderful. Trust me.
THEN ME: I just can't cope with the pain.
NOW ME: I know. But you are going to have to. And it will be worth it.
THEN ME: Why? Is everything perfect in the future?
NOW ME: No. Of course not. Life is never perfect. And I still get depressed from time to time. But I'm at a better place. The pain is never as bad. I found out who I am. I'm happy. Right now, I am happy. The storm ends. Believe me.
THEN ME: I can't believe you.
NOW ME: Why?
THEN ME: You are from the future and I have no future.
NOW ME: I just told you.
Lynne Malcolm: And another symptom that we don't hear much about that you speak about is…you call it 'de-realisation'. What do you mean by that, what's that about?
Matt Haig: It literally makes you feel like you're not real. It's a very hard thing to explain. It's partly physical, as well. You literally feel like you're not there. It's not what you think of, an image of an out-of-body experience where you're somewhere else and looking down. Because you always have this feeling of being there, you never notice it. But when it's suddenly gone, it's a very strange thing to describe. It's like you're kind of invisible, even though you can see yourself. And you look at yourself in your mirror and you don't really relate to that person and everything feels like you've been cut and pasted from some other reality, and it's very sort of alienating. It was in my experience.
Lynne Malcolm: And you've experienced anxiety along with depression. You call it the most common mental illness cocktail.
Matt Haig: Yes. It's very strange because people think of depression always as being something slow, you know, the cliché of someone who can't get out of bed, or you can't get off the sofa, and it has moments of that, and for some people that is what depression is. But in my case, depression mixed with anxiety…anxiety speeds things up. So it's like a fast-forward depression, so you're having a lot of racing thoughts. It was never boring, it was horrendous but it wasn't that slow, flat plane which you think of as the archetypal case of depression. Actually yes, it's certainly in the UK and I think it's probably the same in Australia too, that anxiety and depression it's the most common condition that doctors see.
Lynne Malcolm: Around the year 2000 I think you say that the 'good stuff started to come in'. What was the good stuff for you?
Matt Haig: All kinds of good stuff. I mean, it was stuff that had always been there, but I just was just starting to appreciate. So I suppose if there's a controversial aspect to the book it's the fact that I actually became thankful for having depression, because I was actually appreciating stuff I'd never appreciated before. So I was feeling things more, I was feeling normality more, I was appreciating the people who loved me, you know, family and my girlfriend. And yeah, just everything, you know, when I started to listen to music again, when I started to read books, I mean books were a big part…I was on a different level to what happened before. And I think because depression gives you a thin skin, that's always seen as a bad thing, but the thing about a thin skin is that you actually feel the good stuff more as well.
Lynne Malcolm: And you didn't use medication, it was no good for you.
Matt Haig: Well yeah…I'm very wary in the book to be anti-medication, because medication works for so many people and who am I to argue with that? All I will say is that I was probably prescribed the wrong thing, because I was given anti-anxiety medication like diazepam when I should have been given antidepressants I think. And because I had a bad experience on those drugs I became kind of phobic to taking them. So I had to go the long, hard way round, basically. And in a weird way I'm thankful I did that, because I wouldn't want to live through that again. But the fact that I did live through it meant that I was so in tune with my pain that I'd know anything that made me feel worse or anything that made me feel better. So over time you learn little tricks. I worked out that physical exercises, running, worked for me, diet, all those sensible general healthy lifestyle things affect your mind.
Lynne Malcolm: You're listening to All in the Mind on RN, Radio Australia and perhaps on your ABC Radio mobile app. I'm Lynne Malcolm and I'm speaking with novelist Matt Haig, whose recent memoir Reasons to Stay Alive explores his personal crisis of severe depression and anxiety, and how he learned to enjoy life again. Here's some more of the advice he's given himself along the way.
Readings from Reasons to Stay Alive:
You don't need the world to understand you. It's fine. Some people will never really understand things they haven't experienced. Some will. Be grateful.
Listen to what Hamlet, literature's most famous depressive, told Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: 'There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.'
Three in the morning is never the time to try to sort out your life.
If the sun is shining and you can be outside, be outside.
Read anything you want. Just read. Books are possibilities. They are escape routes. They give you options when you have none. Each one can be a home for an uprooted mind.
Beware of the gap, the gap between where you are and where you want to be. Simply thinking of the gap widens it, and you end up falling through.
Lynne Malcolm: For people listening that have been to the dark place you've been to, can you give more of a sense of how you actually got out of that, the mechanisms?
Matt Haig: Yes, well, unfortunately it's complicated. Simply by holding on, honestly, experiencing time over a period is massively beneficial. And for me, I totally realised that the mind and body, even though we've got a separate idea of mental health and physical health, it's kind of a false separation. For instance, I was getting lots of panic attacks. Yoga and breathing exercises and stuff are so useful for that, because if your body is physically relaxed it's very, very hard to be tense enough to have a panic attack.
And depression, you know, in terms of…running I found really useful, because I was getting a lot of panic attacks and a lot of bad feelings, and when you're running it's very hard to have a panic attack because your heart's already racing, you're already short of breath and there's a real, actual reason. And so that battle you have between 'Oh no, I want to stop, this is too hard, I can't finish', that becomes like a metaphor for what depression is and it gives you some sort of psychological strength, I think.
Various things. I didn't have official therapy, but I think the reason therapy is so effective is because it's a way of externalising a very internal experience. So simply talking and writing about the experience of depression, however well it's done; and when I started to write about depression years and years ago, it was almost unreadable, angst-ridden stuff. It was like the lyrics to some terrible heavy metal song or something. But just getting it out there and giving it human words makes it somehow…I don't know how to explain it but it makes it feel manageable. It makes it feel like something that other people could have felt and other people have dealt with, and actually it's not this alien thing, it's a very human thing and we can deal with it.
Lynne Malcolm: So what is the relationship between your writing, all your writing, and your depression?
Matt Haig: I simply don't think I would be a writer if I hadn't had depression. Depression doesn't make you cleverer, it doesn't make you have a wider vocabulary or any of that, but I think I wouldn't have the drive to write, I don't think I'd have the impulse to write if I hadn't had depression, because writing was one of my ways out of depression. And I think certainly anxiety actually gives you curiosity. I've got kids now and I notice that they'll ask the most questions about things that scare them and worry them. So if you're in a sort of tormented state you become naturally more questioning and curious and all those things needed to write. Not being a religious person, it's the closest I think you get to proper meditation in the act of writing sometimes, when you're literally putting yourself in another world and focussing your mind in a way that you wouldn't do in everyday life. I think just that simple process has been very beneficial.
Reading from Reasons to Stay Alive: Depression is also smaller than you. Always it's smaller than you, even when it feels vast. It operates within you. You don't operate within it. It may be a dark cloud passing across the sky, but if that's the metaphor, you are the sky. You were there before it and the cloud can't exist without the sky. But the sky can exist without the cloud.
Lynne Malcolm: And you said that despite the subject matter you were determined not only to be honest but to be optimistic. Why do you think it's important to generate something positive from what was for you and for most sufferers a very debilitating condition?
Matt Haig: Yes, it was absolutely imperative that I didn't write a book about depression that was going to depress people, because I remember being depressed and I remember being scared of reading about depression, or even being scared of writers I knew who'd killed themselves like Hemingway or Virginia Wolf or Sylvia Plath or whatever. So I was very mindful of the fact that vulnerable people would pick up this book, and I didn't want to give them any more reason to be depressed. So it was a balancing act between being authentically about depression and representing the experience of depression and explaining it to people who might not know about it, while making sure all the arrows pointed upwards and to lead people to a better place.
Because actually when I was a younger man, even before I had depression, I didn't really believe in change. And I think one of the reasons we like stories and fiction, and I think one of the reasons I did, was that they're about change. That's what a story is. And I now do believe in change. I feel like I am in a much better place. And though I'm totally resistant to the term 'self-help' and I'm totally aware of the limits of what words can do, I do think I have something to give, and the fact that I have my story of being very ill and now being less ill, and I think we've all got different stories and I think this one is hopefully worth sharing and it might help other people.
Lynne Malcolm: On first glance the book looks very much like a simple self-help book. But it's so much more complex and nuanced than that. I wonder though, 'Reasons to Stay Alive', in a nutshell, what are they for you now?
Matt Haig: Well, people mainly, and all the big things like love and culture and art and the unknown, basically. Because every single thing that has happened to me, none of it was predicted and certainly nothing good that's happened in my life was predicted during the state of depression. So what I'd say to someone who is actively suicidal, is to say; you're not killing your present self, you're killing every future version of you, so you're killing a lot of yous in that one act. And there are so many very different experiences to have in life. Even people with chronic, permanent depression, there are degrees of depression. It's not a flat state. We change. I'm nothing like the person I was when I was 17, the person I was when I was 24, now I'm 39, I'm sure by the time I'm 50 I'll be someone completely else again.
So we change, life is changed, and Sylvia Plath…a question that haunted me when I had depression was a question that Sylvia Plath asked. And her question was, 'Is there any way out of the mind?' And obviously it's haunting because we know Sylvia Plath killed herself, and that was her way out of the mind. But I would say we don't have the same mind forever. We change with our interactions with society, with other people. We change depending where we are in life, if we're a parent, if we're in a relationship, if we're not in a relationship. We're constantly becoming new people.
Lynne Malcolm: And yet you also say that the only truth that matters is what works for us. It's very individual. Is mental illness really that individual?
Matt Haig: It is quite individual, and there are universal things about it. I think the sense of alienation and that being exacerbated by stigma and the fear of talking about it, these are universal things. For instance, medication really works for some people; it doesn't work for some people. Some people are immune to exercise and that doesn't work and some people it does. I think you have to be in tune with yourself. There's no blanket catch-all solution: therapy works for some, sometimes it doesn't. There's no one wonder drug or wonder solution. I think part of that is that we don't quite have the science yet. The science of the brain is still very mysterious. There isn't really scientific consensus on depression.
Starting this book, I thought naively that we knew everything, that there were neuroscientists out there could 100% explain to me exactly what was happening in my brain and why it was happening. And now I realise that although we have brain scans, although we can see little parts of our brain flash up when we're excited, when we're hungry, when we're sad, we don't actually know the hows and whys of that. We kind of know it has something to do with brain chemicals like serotonin, dopamine and all of that, but the hows and whys of it are still totally unknown. And that's quite frightening.
Lynne Malcolm: So what would be the one message that you'd really want to get out there about depression?
Matt Haig: Well, this is a book for two people. It's a book for people who've had depression, but it's also…another thing I was trying to do with this book is actually to explain to people that although it's invisible, although depression doesn't come with crutches or a rash or anything visible, it is a very, very real illness. It's a serious illness. It's one of the few illnesses that is so bad that people actually take their lives simply because they've got this illness. So it is a real illness and we should never judge people or doubt people who have this illness, because it's as real as anything I've known, and when you're in it it's a sort of 24/7 thing.
But the ultimate message I'd like to get across is a hopeful one, that the very, very bottom of the valley where depression takes you never provides the clearest view, and although you can't magically sort of get an imaginary helicopter to transport you out of that place, simply by knowing that, simply by knowing that the tunnel does have light at the end of it can be enough sometimes to keep on going. So that is the message.
Lynne Malcolm: Broadly speaking the reaction to your book has been quite overwhelmingly positive, and Stephen Fry is quoted on the front saying, 'Matt Haig is astounding.' And his tweet, 'The short book that Matt Haig has written is the best I've ever read on coping with depression. It is so RIGHT.' What was it like to receive that sort of feedback?
Matt Haig: Yeah, that one was completely out of the blue, and that really was quite crazy. And yeah, it's been incredible, because this isn't my first book, it's like my ninth book, so I'm used to what the feeling of a book coming out is like, and this has been totally unlike any book that I've written in terms of response from the sort of get-go. It's been great that people have responded to it. I think I'm surprised by it, I think my publishers were surprised by it.
My publishers didn't give me loads of money for this book, I do well with them for novels and stuff, but this was always seen as kind of a side project, and now it's become like this thing that people are reacting to and responding to, and yeah, it's great. And it's weirdly sort of therapeutic for me, because I'm getting to hear…not just from celebrities but from like just people who've had experience of depression and the book's helped them, or they just simply want to tell me their stories, and how many similar stories…although depression isn't universally the same, there are a lot of people who've had a very similar experience to mine. And for me I think on a personal level that subconsciously is probably why I wrote it, to hear that echo back, to sort of say actually it's okay, you're not a freak, you're not an alien, you're just someone who's had this horrible thing, but a very, very common thing, and we should be not at all ashamed to talk or write about it.
Lynne Malcolm: So what's next for you?
Matt Haig: Well, I've just been doing something which is…ah, because I've been sort of surrounded by talking about depression and talking about anxiety, I've just written a children's book which is nothing at all to do with depression. It's to do with Father Christmas, actually, so it's the complete…
Lynne Malcolm: More therapy…
Matt Haig: Yes. Father Christmas doesn't have a breakdown in it, he's just your everyday Father Christmas as a young boy. So I probably will return to the subject at some point, because there's a lot more I want to say about society and about how we live in a world where happiness isn't always a priority, or even calmness isn't a priority, and maybe it should be more of one. But at the moment, yeah, I'm enjoying doing different things.
Lynne Malcolm: Lovely. Thanks very much, Matt Haig.
Matt Haig: Thank you.
Reading from Reasons to Stay Alive: Remember that the key thing about life on earth is change. Cars rust. Paper yellows. Technology dates. Caterpillars become butterflies. Nights morph into days. Depression lifts.
Lynne Malcolm: Some of Matt Haig's words of advice to himself from his memoir Reasons to Stay Alive. And Matt Haig was in Australia for the Sydney Writers' Festival.
Thanks to Wendy Zukerman, Jesse Cox, Tiger Webb and Claudia Taranto for the readings today.
For more details go to the All in the Mind website via the RN home page, and to keep the conversation going why not leave a comment on the page or on Facebook or tweet about some of the small joys in your life. Just tag @AllintheMind and use the hashtag #reasonstostayalive, it should make for some uplifting reading.
Thanks to the team Diane Dean and Andrei Shabonov, I'm Lynne Malcolm, great to have your company. Catch you at the same time next week. Bye for now.
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