14mMatt Haig on his new book, mental health, and social media – full interview
Cathy Newman
Presenter
NHS 111 is now offering mental health support to adults and children. People in England calling the helpline can now select a mental health option to speak to a trained professional, who will give them urgent help or guide them to other services.
One person who’s been very open about his own mental health struggles and his recent diagnoses of autism and ADHD, is the bestselling author Matt Haig.
His book ‘The Midnight Library’ sold nine million copies worldwide. Now he has a new novel out, ‘The Life Impossible’, which is infused with magic realism and set in Ibiza, where he almost took his own life 25 years ago.
Warning – includes references to suicide.
Matt Haig: I can go even further and just see it as health, because mental health is essentially physical health.
Cathy Newman: Matt Haig, you’ve got a complicated relationship with Ibiza. Obviously it was central to your bestselling memoir, and you’ve now returned there in fictional form. Just explain why.
Matt Haig: I’ve got a very complicated relationship because as a young, foolish person, I was the typical Ibiza cliché in the 90s. Lots of unhealthy lifestyle, drink and drugs and I ended up quite ill for all sorts of reasons in 1999, and I was suicidal there. So coming back was quite a sort of, cathartic thing. That was 20 years later. For years, I couldn’t actually go there. I couldn’t face the idea of it. It was easy to leave the past behind, by leaving the place behind. It was only quite recently when I was actually, for the first time in my life having therapy – I should have had it years before – I thought, you know what, I need to go back to the place where I was at my worst, when I was my most insecure, when I was in the midst of panic and depression. So I went back there and while I was there, after not having written anything for over a year, I had this idea for a story about transformation and about healing and that was very much associated with my experience.
Cathy Newman: So in a way, it was therapy for you going back there, but also therapy for your central character in a funny kind of way.
Matt Haig: Totally. And I deliberately chose a central character who wasn’t the Ibiza cliché. A retired maths teacher who’s grieving and the last person she would think of, as going to Ibiza. But she goes there because she’s left – or bequeathed – to use a fancy word, a house, on the island by a friend she hasn’t seen since the 1970s. So she’s wondering why has this person left her this house, what’s happened to her friend, has she died and so she goes over to investigate, and it becomes a very weird, strange tale of transformation and superpowers and all kinds of weird things happen to her. But essentially it’s a tale of healing and recovery. And it’s a fantasy because the reality of healing and coming out of any trauma experience, in my experience, always has a sort of surreal edge to it. It felt like the most realistic way to do it.
Cathy Newman: She’s a maths teacher, so hyper-rational and yet it’s kind of magical realism. It’s a bit like Alice in Wonderland believing such impossible things before breakfast, isn’t it?
Matt Haig: Absolutely. It starts off quite realistically, but I always get a little bit bored of staying within realism. And I think if you’re making up something, you might as well really make up something. So for me, it just felt the most natural way to tell this story, to go a little bit wild in the mid on.
Cathy Newman: And you’ve talked about taking a break from writing. Your previous book, ‘The Midnight Library’, was a huge success. In a funny kind of way, that came at a huge personal cost didn’t it, to yourself?
Matt Haig: It wasn’t solely to do with that. I think I was having a little bit of a crisis. Like lots of people this was during the first year of the pandemic, I had a lot of things going on. I hadn’t drank for years, and I’d started drinking again, and I was a little bit lost and feeling the depression coming in. It wasn’t quite like what I’d known 20 years previously, but I was having that. And then on top of that, I was in a situation where I should have been very grateful and very happy for everything, and I just wasn’t feeling that. I was having all sorts of crises and I thought, maybe it’s writing, maybe I should be something else.
And so I gave up writing for a year or so and I went out into the real world. Had both a cliched idea of maybe setting up a bookshop or a sober bar, which, I live in Brighton, that’s quite a cliche for Brighton to set up a sober bar in Brighton. But I didn’t really know. I was a bit lost. ‘The Midnight Library’ and everyone thinking you should be having the time of your life, which I probably should have been, but I wasn’t. It was a very strange time, but it actually, in the end, made me realise I want to write for the right reasons. And it’s not about the public facing side of it so much. It’s about writing for myself and writing the sort of strange stuff I want to write. I find a kind of ‘cliche alert’ therapy in that as well.
Cathy Newman: Going back to Ibiza and facing those demons. How hard was that in the end? You described it as cathartic but how difficult was it?
Matt Haig: It was made easier by the fact that it was April, so it was out of tourist season and it was overcast skies. No night clubs were open, very few tourists about. So it wasn’t the Ibiza of the public reality TV imagination. It was the quieter, more natural place that it can be and is largely when you go there. It was very interesting to go back to the cliffs where I’d been my most ill, and nearly took my life, and seeing all that as a different person. Over two decades had passed, the island had changed, I’d changed. It was finally facing up to the place and the person I used to be and it was quite a healing Ibizan kind of vibe.
Cathy Newman: So you actually went to the spot where you almost…
Matt Haig: Yeah, we were staying quite close by, and the spot where it was, because we used to live near the cliffs. I went there and it was a big moment. But also it wasn’t a moment at all because I felt so distant and detached from it, just another patch of scrubland. And it was a very strange big nothing in the end. So it was a very weird thing and it made me realise that I’m very much at a different place in life. I wouldn’t say I’m 100% perfectly mentally well all the time, but very different to that young person.
Cathy Newman: And this was part of a journey of, I guess, self-discovery? You’ve talked about therapy for the first time, and you also were diagnosed as an adult with ADHD and autism. How much of a difference has that diagnosis made to you?
Matt Haig: On a personal level it has made quite a big difference. I’m not going to go out there and become a spokesperson for autism or anything, because I’m still working it all out myself and it just made a lot of sense for me. It’s a massively overused word, mindfulness, but I think it’s given me pause and reflection in my own behaviours, particularly the ADHD one. I think – that impulsive thing – do I need to do that? Do I need to post that tweet? Do I need to be rash? Do I need to have that drink? And it gives you that… You think, oh no, it’s the ADHD. So in that sense it’s been useful.
But it’s bittersweet in midlife when you get a diagnosis. I was told at school I was special needs, but I was never told what those needs were. I was never told what the ‘special’ in special needs was, and people didn’t have the answers back then. But I was always just seen as a little bit different. But getting the diagnosis unlocks a lot of things. But you think, ah if I’d have known 30, 40 years ago, would it have made a difference?
Cathy Newman: ‘The Midnight Library’ deals with alternative stories of your protagonist’s life. Could you have had an alternative story? If you had been diagnosed earlier, would things have panned out differently?
Matt Haig: Possibly. I was given medication when I had my diagnosis and I did change a lot of things. And I think I would have been a bit kinder to myself because my thing when I was younger, I was always trying to fit in, but never feeling like I would fit in. I remember problematic behaviour. I got arrested for shoplifting when I was 16 years old, and I was a compulsive shoplifter before then. And then obviously the drink and drugs which led in, so you think now, looking at the Venn diagram of ADHD and those sort of behaviours when it’s undiagnosed, you know, it’s quite high. So possibly. But I don’t know. And a big theme of my work is not drowning in regret. So I try to not do that with my own life too.
Cathy Newman: There is an NHS taskforce looking at the huge increase in diagnoses of ADHD. For example, there are some warnings that private clinics are over diagnosing or even misdiagnosing it. Is that a legitimate cause for concern, or is there something liberating about people having the confidence and the courage to get a diagnosis in a way that could be life-changing?
Matt Haig: Yeah. I don’t go around thinking, waking up every day, thinking, oh, I’m an ADHD person. It was just a diagnosis I was given. I think basically there’s just been a massive problem of under diagnosis, for years and decades. It’s not the case, there probably are people who are diagnosed miscorrectly. And, you know, all these things are evolving over time. But I think it’s good to actually understand that these previously invisible things are now being seen. And if it gives comfort to people, if it helps people, if it gives people the right medication that they’ve never had, then obviously that’s a positive thing.
Cathy Newman: The new government has made a big point of saying that mental health should be treated on a par with physical health. Children’s mental health in particular, a key focus. Are you encouraged by that or do you think, do you worry, that there aren’t resources to handle that, that the NHS is so overstretched it can’t cope with the level of diagnoses in this area?
Matt Haig: That’s certainly the case at the moment, I mean with neurodiversity, with mental health, that has been the case. It’s been starved of resources for over a decade. There’s a big massive problem but obviously it’s good that these noises and speeches are being made now, and let’s see going forward. But the fact that they’re drawing attention to it has to be a positive sign. And the idea of physical health having, mental health having parity with physical health has got to be a good thing. I think you can go even further and just see it as health, because mental health is essentially physical health. Our brains are physical things. Our nervous systems are physical things. It is health and it’s all equally important – as I and millions of other people now, it can really impact your life in long-lasting ways. So, yes, it’s great that this is happening.
Cathy Newman: You talked about impulsive tweets and that kind of thing. And I just wondered the role that social media has played in your own mental health challenges.
Matt Haig: Again, as someone who’s had addictive problems with alcohol, I think ten years from now we are going to realise, even more than we do right now, social media should probably come with its own government health warnings. And things that aren’t necessarily substance can still be addictive, can still change behaviour. In my own case, I used to waste far too much of my life arguing with people online, and I really try not to do that anymore. I am back online, but. ..
Cathy Newman: You’re back in a very sort of controlled way. Is that you tweeting?
Matt Haig: I’m not back arguing on Twitter. Yeah, it’s always me, but I took a year off. Actually, when I wrote this book, I was away from social media, and I think it helped this book happen. But I think there’s a challenge for writers and people generally now, with competing with social media, especially like books. This quiet media form is quite a calm media form. How do we write for this age, 2024, of distraction and of continual entertainment and stimulation. And I think that’s a challenge for writers. And that might be, if you’ve got a little bit of an attention problem yourself, it might help you address that.
Cathy Newman: You really think that in terms of health warnings, social media is as problematic, as addictive, as smoking or alcohol. It should have that kind of level of alarm?
Matt Haig: Unlike smoking, there’s a positive side to it. So it’s a complicated picture. And there’s aspects of social media that have been really great and good and it’s great to get your message about. And people who wouldn’t have been discovered in the past can now be discovered because they can get their work out there, their music out there. I think for creators that is very much a positive side. But in terms of mental health, neurosis, continual comparison, of comparing yourself to other people, yeah, that stuff needs to be addressed, especially for young people and teenagers and the dangers therein.
Cathy Newman: But for you personally, being sort of slightly removed from social media, as you put it, how good is that?
Matt Haig: Yeah, I have a much better understanding about when I’m starting to feel anxious or depressed or whatever it is. But as with stopping drinking, to step away or to have a totally different relationship or as I did for a short while, have someone else do it on your behalf. That’s helpful.