Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig review – one man’s battle with depression

A timely memoir of mental illness reads as a highly personal and creative response to crisis

With one in five people now suffering from depression at some point in their lives, the miasma that lingers over public discussions of mental health seems increasingly anachronistic, and makes books like Matt Haig’s anatomy of the depression and anxiety from which he suffered between the ages of 24 and 32 all the more timely.

A self-confessed “party person” in his youth, Haig was blindsided by his first bout of depression while pursuing a hedonistic lifestyle in Ibiza. He describes the physical onset of his symptoms as an “intense flickering” in his head, “as though a butterfly was trapped”; by the time he returned home, even a trip to the cornershop had become a source of paralysing terror.

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