Matt Haig

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.

Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently.

Because it was, in part, through reading and writing that I found a kind of salvation from the dark. Ever since I realised that depression lied about the future I have wanted to write a book about my experience, to tackle depression and anxiety head-on.

I wanted to be dead. No. That’s not quite right. I didn’t want to be dead, I just didn’t want to be alive. Death was something that scared me. And death only happens to people who have been living.

MEDICATION IS AN incredibly attractive concept. Not just for the person with depression, or the person running a pharmaceutical firm, but for society as a whole. It underlines the idea we have hammered into us by the hundred thousand TV ads we have seen that everything can be fixed by consuming things. It fosters a just-shut-up-and-take-the-pill approach, and creates an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide, where everyone can relax and feel ‘unreason’ – to borrow Michel Foucault’s favourite word – is being safely neutered in a society which demands we be normal even as it drives us insane.

The tunnel does have light at the end of it, even if we aren’t able to see it

death only happens to people who have been living.

At its worst you find yourself wishing, desperately, for any other affliction, any physical pain, because the mind is infinite, and its torments – when they happen – can be equally infinite.

depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It kills more people than most other forms of violence – warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, gun crime – put together.

depression is one of the deadliest diseases on the planet. It kills more people than most other forms of violence – warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, gun crime – put together.