The Brighton author Matt Haig has said that he was “phobic” about getting help after experiencing a breakdown that left him suicidal.
Haig, 51, who wrote The Midnight Library, was living in Ibiza with his then-girlfriend Andrea Semple when he experienced a “very sudden” breakdown in his twenties.
He told Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4: “I’d been running that morning and everything seemed to cave in at once.
“It was like a panic attack that didn’t end. This was escalating and escalating and didn’t seem within my control. Andrea was there and we didn’t know what to do.
“I was suicidal but … it sounds weird … but I didn’t have a death wish. I just did not know what to do with this reality.
“Because of this location of the villa by the cliffs, I could just walk and disappear. Andrea later, found me in that state. This happened twice.
“Because Andrea knew I was suicidal, she managed to get me away from the cliffs and into a car and talked me into going to the hospital which was terrifying.
“I was strangely agoraphobic as well and prescribed industrial-strength diazepam. That didn’t help me.”
Haig returned home – to Nottingham at the time – and moved back in with his parents for three months.
He regularly had tightness in his chest and a racing heart during this period, adding: “I had a lot of derealisation where you felt like the world wasn’t real and you didn’t recognise yourself in the mirror.”
Haig eventually went to a GP but did not find much help. He said: “We went to the doctor and she asked me halfway through if I’d ever taken recreational drugs.
“And as soon as I answered yes, you could see the moral judgment set in. I was never offered therapy. We weren’t really in a position to afford therapy.
“I was also now, because of the experience with the GP, I was also phobic about getting help. I was my own worst enemy. I didn’t have therapeutic help for 20 years.”
Haig and Semple eventually moved to Leeds where they would take regular walks where the writer “slowly processed everything”.
He said: “I stopped drinking, never took drugs again. You hold on long enough and you realise your brain is lying to you. I was convinced I’d be dead at the age of 25 by my own hand.
“You make it to 25. Then you make it to 26 and you think … that depression that was so certain, I was wrong about that.
“In that mindset, you think, maybe I could have a book published or make a success of being a writer.”
Haig’s first novel, The Last Family in England, was published in 2004. It was followed by others including The Radleys (2010), How to Stop Time (2017), The Midnight Train (2026) and several children’s books.
He wrote about his battle with depression and anxiety in his 2015 memoir Reasons to Stay Alive.
Haig and Semple married in 2013 and live near the Seven Dials, in Brighton, with their children Lucas, 18, and Pearl, 17.
There’s still more work to do, but it is heartening to see that we’re seeing a breakdown in the stigma that men have to just be strong and carry on, and stories like Matt Haig’s are important in breaking down that narrative.