Matt Haig

Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.

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

You have felt other things. You will feel other things again.

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.

One of the key symptoms of depression is to see no hope. No future. Far from the tunnel having light at the end of it, it seems like it is blocked at both ends, and you are inside it. So if I could have only known the future, that there would be one far brighter than anything I’d experienced, then one end of that tunnel would have been blown to pieces, and I could have faced the light. So the fact that this book exists is proof that depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong.

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.