Reasons To Stay Alive

Reasons To Stay Alive shows you the dangers and difficulties surrounding mental illness, uncovers the stigma around it, and identifies how to recover from it by sharing the story of Matt Haig’s recovery after an awful panic attack and subsequent battle with depression and anxiety.

Have you ever tried to explain a complicated concept to a friend? While you know how to do everything from opening your mouth to saying the words, they often just don’t get it.

It’s frustrating to not be able to make yourself understood, which is just what the author experienced after his panic attack. He couldn’t adequately express his feelings to family and friends in a way they could comprehend.

Because his paradigm was so different from theirs, it was like “trying to describe earth to aliens.” Even more frustrating was the fact that he didn’t really know how to explain what was going on to himself.

Haig’s perspective was completely drowning in depression and anxiety.

But hope came in the form of an unlikely hero: books. Although many use literature as a way to escape their reality, the author experienced the opposite. The right books helped him find himself once more.

As he discovered characters that felt alienated, he began to realize that he wasn’t as alone as he thought. He felt that he could relate to these authors, who knew what it felt like to be as lonely as he was.

Even the very language of books, which can sometimes be perplexing, helped Haig understand what he was going through. The purpose-filled protagonists lent him their direction when he didn’t feel like he had any.

And now his book provides that for those who read it!

Did you know that Winston Churchill and Abraham Lincoln both struggled with depression? Behind their inspiring and ambitious careers was this silent struggle with mental illness. Most of us would consider their achievements in spite of their struggles admirable. But do we ever consider that maybe their demons were the entire reason these two leaders were so successful? The truth is, there are benefits of mental illness, like improved empathy and perception, but we usually don’t talk about them. Someone who has experienced depression, for example, knows well know painful life is sometimes. That might have been the reason why Lincoln was so understanding of the awfulness of slavery. In Churchill’s case, he was among the few European leaders who had a bad feeling about the Nazi’s from the beginning. If it weren’t for the sensitivity that he got from his mental illness, he might not have picked up on how dangerous they were. Even the author used to resist the thin skin that he felt his…