by Matt Haig
An increasing amount of research reinforces their concerns. For example, studies that show how technology contributes to a state of ‘continual partial attention’ and how it can be addictive. One 2017 study from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas concluded that the mere presence of your smartphone can reduce ‘cognitive capacity’.
At the time of writing, there is still no official recognition that ‘smartphone addiction’ or ‘social media addiction’ are psychological disorders, although the fact that the World Health Organization now classifies video game addiction as an official mental disorder suggests that there is a growing understanding of how seriously technology can affect our mental health. But that understanding still has a long way to go, and clearly lags behind the disorientating speed of technological change.
Though pressure is rising. In 2018, for instance, CNN reported that the mighty Unilever threatened to pull its advertising from Facebook and Google unless they combat toxic problems – including privacy concerns, objectionable content and a lack of protections for children – which are ‘eroding social trust, harming users and undermining democracies’. There is a growing awareness that the great power of internet companies must come, Spiderman-style, with a great sense of responsibility. However, it is debatable as to how much responsibility they will develop without real social and financial pressure of the kind we are only beginning to see. As with fast food or cigarettes or the gun industry, the companies making a profit from something might be the most reluctant to see the potential problems. So when the people on the inside are among those raising the alarm, we should really listen.
11
THE DETECTIVE OF DESPAIR
‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Awareness
WHEN I FIRST became ill, at the age of 24 – when I ‘broke down’ – the world became sharper. Painfully so. Shadows had sudden weight, clouds became greyer, music became louder. I became more alert to everything I had been numb to. I noticed the things that made me feel worse about the modern world. Things that probably make many of us feel worse. I felt the wearying pressure of advertising, the frantic madness of crowds and traffic, the suffocating nature of social expectation.
Illness has a lot to teach wellness.
But when I am well I forget these things. The trick is to keep hold of that knowledge. To turn recovery into prevention. To live how I live when I am ill, without being ill.
Hope
THERE ARE SOME factors affecting our mental health that are genetic, and down to an individual’s wiring or brain chemistry. But we can’t do much about the things handed down to us in our genetic code. What is more interesting are the transient aspects, the triggers that change with time and societies. These are the things we can do stuff about.
Other eras have had their own particular mental health crises of course. But the fact that every age has struggled with its own particular problems should not make us complacent about our own culture.
And the great thing about this – the liberating thing – is that if our anxiety is in part a product of culture, it can also be something we can change by changing our reaction to that culture. In fact, we don’t even need to consciously change at all. The change can happen simply by being aware.
When it comes to our minds, awareness is very often the solution itself.
The detective of despair
I THINK THE world is always going to be a mess. And I am always going to be a mess. Maybe you’re a mess, too. But – and this bit is everything for me – I believe it’s possible to be a happy mess. Or, at least, a less miserable mess. A mess who can cope.
‘In all chaos there is a cosmos,’ said Carl Jung, ‘in all disorder a secret order.’
Mess is actually okay. As you will be aware by now, I am trying to write about the messiness of the world and the messiness of minds by writing a deliberately messy book. That’s my excuse, anyway. Fragments that I hope together make a kind of whole. I hope it all makes sense. Or if it doesn’t make sense, I hope it makes nonsense in ways that might get you thinking.
The problem is not that the world is a mess, but that we expect it to be otherwise. We are given the idea that we have control. That we can go anywhere and be anything. That, because of free will in a world of choice, we should be able to choose not just where to go online or what to watch on TV or which recipe to follow of the billion online recipes, but also what to feel. And so when we don’t feel what we want or expect to feel, it becomes confusing and disheartening. Why can’t I be happy when I have so much choice? And why do I feel sad and worried when I don’t really have anything to be sad and worried about?
And the truth is that when I first became ill, at the very beginning, I didn’t even know what I had, let alone what might be triggering it. I had no understanding of the hell I wanted to escape, I just wanted to escape it. If your leg is on fire you don’t know the temperature of the flames. You just know that you’re in pain.
Later, doctors would offer labels. ‘Panic disorder’, ‘generalised anxiety disorder’ and ‘depression’. These labels were worrying, but also important, because they gave me something to work with. They stopped me feeling like an alien. I was a human being with human illnesses, which other humans have had – millions and millions of humans – and most of them had either overcome their illnesses or had somehow managed to live with them.
Even after I knew the names of the illnesses I had, I believed they were all stemming from inside me. They were just there, the way the Grand Canyon was just there,a fixed feature of my psychic geography which I could do nothing about.
I would never be able to enjoy music again. Or food. Or books. Or conversation. Or sunlight. Or cinema. Or a holiday. Or anything. I was rotten now, to my core, like a, like a, like a (there are never enough metaphors for depression), like a diseased tree. A diseased tree whose girlfriend and parents say, over and over, ‘You’ll get better. We’ll find a way and we will get you better.’
And, of course, there were different remedies. I tried the diazepam a doctor gave me. I tried the various tinctures a homeopath gave me. I tried the recommendations of friends and family. I tried St John’s Wort and lavender oil. I tried sleeping pills. I tried talking to telephone helplines. Then I stopped trying. I had a nightmarish time on diazepam and an even more nightmarish time coming off diazepam. I should probably have tried taking different pills, but – judge me if you will – I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking rationally. Complicating the situation was the fact that I was scared – I mean, terrified beyond anything I’d ever known – of trying more pills, or of seeking more help now that nothing had worked.
When I mentioned this in Reasons to Stay Alive a couple of people thought I was making a statement against pills, so I will say here, as clearly as possible: I am not against pills. Yes, there are all kinds of issues with the pharmaceutical industry and the scientific research is still a work in progress (as scientific research, by its nature, tends to be), but I also know that pills have saved many people’s lives. I know of people who say they could not survive without them. I also believe there would be medication out there that could probably have helped me, but I didn’t find it. I don’t believe pills are a total solution. I also believe certain misprescribed pills can make some people feel worse, but that is the same with anything. You could get the wrong pills for arthritis or your heart condition. And to say that pills aren’t the only answer is common sense. They rarely are. If you have arthritis, yoga and swimming and hot sunshine might be helpful and pills might also be helpful. It’s not an either/or situation. We have to find what works for us. Also, in my case, I was traumatised, and wasn’t even close to thinking straight.
At that time, trying things that didn’t work only made life worse. As I said, there may well have been the right treatment out there for me – talk or medication – but I wasn’t lucky enough to find it. I wasn’t brave enough to seek it out. T
he pain was as much as I could bear to just about stay alive. I couldn’t risk a gram of difference, that was my logic. Every day felt like life or death. Not because the pain wasn’t bad enough to keep going back to the doctor, but because it was too bad. Writing that down, I realise how ridiculous that sounds, but that was my reality then. Everything I had tried to combat the turmoil inside my head had failed. And, to be honest, the doctors I had encountered hadn’t been that understanding. I sincerely believe that things have moved on in lots of ways since the turn of this century.
So, anyway, I was there, in this pit, desperately trying to find a way out as every escape route seemed to be closing.
And, as many people in this situation discover, you acquire evidence like a detective trying to solve a murder. At first there were no clues, or none I could see. Every day in that pit was hell. Every day, in those first few weeks and months, contained moments of such heavy emotional pain that they stopped any hope breaking through. But the pain, I started to realise, although internal, often had external triggers. There was nothing I had found that made me feel better. Then I realised that certain things could make me feel worse: drinking alcohol, smoking, loud music, crowds. The world gets in. It always gets in, however we are doing. But until I became ill, I never knew how.
Note to self
KEEP CALM. KEEP going. Keep human. Keep pushing. Keep yearning. Keep perfecting. Keep looking out the window. Keep focus. Keep free. Keep ignoring the trolls. Keep ignoring pop-up ads and pop-up thoughts. Keep risking ridicule. Keep curious. Keep hold of the truth. Keep loving. Keep allowing yourself the human privilege of mistakes. Keep a space that is you and put a fence around it. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep your phone at arm’s length. Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. Keep breathing. Keep inhaling life itself.
Keep remembering where stress can lead.
(Keep remembering that day in the shopping centre.)
Fear and shopping
I WAS IN a shopping centre, crying.
Me, aged 24, surrounded by crowds of people and shops and illuminated signs, unable to cope.
‘No,’ I whispered, as my breathing lost its rhythm. ‘I can’t do this.’
‘Matt?’
It had been a test. To go with Andrea, then my girlfriend, to this city near her parents’ home – Newcastle, in the north of England – and do some shopping. I had no idea what we were shopping for. My focus was simply on making it through without having a panic attack.
To be like any other normal person.
‘I’m sorry, I just can’t, I . . .’
There I was. Pathetic. A young man. In a world that had told me – everywhere from TV shows to the school sports field – that being a man means being strong and tough and silent in the face of pain, a world that showed us that being young was about having fun and being free in the bright, shining land of youth. And here I was, in the supposed prime of my life, crying about nothing in a shopping centre. Well, it wasn’t really about nothing. It was about pain. And terror. A pain and terror I had never known until a little over a month before, while working in Spain, when I had a panic attack that started and didn’t stop and then became fused with a terrible, indescribable sense of dread and malaise and hopelessness which seeped into my flesh and bones.
The despair had been so strong that it had very nearly taken my life. There had seemed no way out. However scary death was, this living terror had seemed worse. Everyone has a limit – a point at which they can’t take any more – and, almost out of nowhere, I had reached mine.
‘It’s all right,’ Andrea was saying, holding my hand. More mother or nurse than girlfriend in that moment.
‘No, it isn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’
‘Did you take the diazepam this morning?’
‘Yes, but it’s not working.’
‘It’s going to be all right. It’s just panic.’
Just panic.
Her concerned eyes made it worse. I’d already put her through so much. All I had to do was walk. Walk and talk and breathe like a normal human being. It wasn’t rocket science. But right then, it might as well have been.
‘I can’t.’
Andrea’s face hardened now. Her jaw clenched and mouth tightened. Even she had limits. She was cross at me and for me. ‘You can do it.’
‘No, Andi, I really fucking can’t. You don’t understand.’
People were looking at us, casting sideways glances in our direction as they walked along weighed down with carrier bags.
‘Just breathe. Just breathe slowly.’
I tried to breathe deep, but the air could hardly make it beyond my throat.
‘I . . . I . . . I . . . There’s no air.’
Earlier in the day, I hadn’t been feeling as bad as this. Just a low-level unshiftable despair. On the bus into the city, the fear had crept over me, like being slowly wrapped in an itchy blanket.
Now my whole body was alive with terror.
I was frozen right there, standing outside Vision Express, surrounded by life yet alone. I began to swallow. To try to direct myself. Compulsive swallowing had been one of a few mild OCD symptoms I had developed. This time I was actually wanting that symptom just to distract me from a worse one. But it didn’t work.
There was no hope. There was no way out. Life was for other people.
I had held back the world, and now it was caving in. And Andrea’s voice became something far away, the last hope, trying to reach the person I no longer was.
You only have one mind
WHEN I LOOK back on the shopping centre experience – one experience among many similar ones that sometimes burst into my brain like a Vietnam flashback without the violence – I try to dissect it. I relive the past in order to accept it and learn from it. Not just to learn how not to have panic attacks, but to learn how my mind intersects with the world and work out how to be less stressed generally.
The first problem was that it took place within my earliest experience of anxiety and depression. When you have a bout of mental illness for the first time, you imagine this is how your life is going to be for ever. You will have depression punctuated by panic attacks and that is how things will stay. And that was terrifying. The claustrophobia of it. There seemed no way out.
The second problem was that I still had no idea how to deal with panic attacks. That lesson was going to take years to learn.
And the third problem was that I didn’t understand how the external and the internal were connected. I didn’t know how related ‘what you feel’ is to ‘where you are’. I didn’t know that the world of shops and sales and marketing is not always good for minds. A lot of research has been done in recent years about the effect of external environments on our health. For instance, a 2013 study commissioned by the mental health charity Mind and run by the University of Essex compared the experience of walking in a shopping centre with a ‘green walk’ around Belhus Woods Country Park in Essex. Although walking is known to be good for a mind – indoors or outdoors – 44 per cent of the people who walked in a shopping centre said they felt a decrease in self-esteem. Whereas nearly all (90 per cent) of the people who went for the forest walk felt their self-esteem increase. There is an increasing amount of research like this, as I’ll mention later, about how nature is good for our minds. But at the time I knew none of that. Indeed, most of the research hadn’t been done.
It makes sense that shopping centres aren’t easy places to be in. A shopping centre is a deliberately stimulating environment, designed not to calm or comfort, but merely to get us to spend money. And as anxiety is often a trigger for consumption, feeling calm and satisfied would probably work against the shopping centre’s best interests. Calmness and satisfaction – in the agenda of the shopping centre – are destinations we reach by purchasing. Not places already there.
The fourth problem was guilt. I felt guilty about symptoms I didn’t really see as symptoms of an illness. I saw them as symptoms of me-ness.
&nbs
p; Another lesson I am still coming to understand – and writing this book is helping me – is that distraction didn’t and doesn’t work. For one thing, shopping centres are deliberately very distracting environments, but they didn’t take me out of myself, only into myself. The bustling crowds of other people didn’t help connect me to humanity. I felt more alone among masses of people than I did when it was just me and one other person, or even just myself.
This was an already familiar tactic of mine: trying to distract myself from one torment by finding another. Years before Twitter, and the mind-numbing compulsive checking of social media, I had the desperate need for distraction. But it was no good. You develop symptoms more by fighting them than inviting them. Distraction is an attempt to escape that rarely works. You don’t put out a fire by ignoring the fire. You have to acknowledge the fire. You can’t compulsively swallow or tweet or drink your way out of pain. There comes a point at which you have to face it. To face yourself. In a world of a million distractions you are still left with only one mind.
The mannequins who inflict pain
WHEN I NOW think of that particular panic attack I think of how the world got in. Even at the time I had an instinctive – if not totally conscious – idea of the triggers around me. Even a shop’s mannequins added to it.