Reviews

Syitä pysytellä hengissä by Matt Haig

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chelle22's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective

4.0

Content Warnings

gsroney's review against another edition

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2.0

While the author has a talent for describing what depression feels like, he does not seem to have much else to say on the subject. I think this would be fine, except for the fact that the book is marketed as reasons to stay alive. It’s very clear that his depression is under much better control, and maybe that is all the hope and reason that one would need, but overall the book was meandering and somewhat superficial.

“The word depression makes me think of a flat tire, something punctured and unmoving. Maybe depression minus anxiety feels like that, but depression laced with terror is not something flat or still. (The poet Melissa Broder once tweeted: “what idiot called it ‘depression’ and not ‘there are bats living in my chest and they take up a lot of room, ps. I see a shadow’?”) 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.”

“I wished like mad, in that moment, that I had no one at all. Not a single soul. Love was trapping me here. And they didn’t know what it was like, what my head was like. Maybe if they were in my head for ten minutes they’d be like, “Oh, okay, yes, actually. You should jump.”

lucasgarner's review against another edition

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2.0

I appreciate what Matt Haig is trying to do here, and I don’t want to take away from his lived experiences. However, for someone who has clearly gone through depression, Haig writes somewhat narrow-mindedly about the subject. There are many assertions here that are not true for most people, and are written with a POV of authority that isn’t warranted. Other than his own experience and some quickly googled facts from WHO, he doesn’t really have a solid understanding on the treatment of depression, and when writing a book on exactly that, it’s a pretty glaring thing problem. It seems like he had three books in mind; a memoir about his struggle with depression, a self-help book, and a dissertation on depression in famous literature, but doesn’t really succeed at any of these. The book is too jumbled to get a good grasp on what he went through (other than some good well-written passages that made me realize that a memoir is what this book should have been), but also lacked the proper research to be an actual self-help book. Obviously this book has resonated with a lot of people, so there is good to be found here, but for me the book was too jumbled and too unfocused on its actual intentions to work for me.