Reasons to Stay Alive

Although Reasons to Stay Alive is a personal journey, it is also an exploration of the attitudes, stigmas, and misconceptions about mental health and mental illness. Throughout the memoir, Haig examines gender biases and the limitations that a lack of lived experience can impose on those trying to understand the scope of mental illness.

Drawing from both personal experience and factual statistics, Haig highlights some of the key problems in society’s relationship with mental well-being. For example, in Chapter 6, Haig claims that depression ends more lives than “warfare, terrorism, domestic abuse, assault, [and] gun crime put together” (25). Since depression is internal and largely invisible, it is not often taken seriously until the tipping point when it becomes too late. Chapter 7 has a tongue-in-cheek tone and lists comments people make about those with depression through the lens of other illnesses and injuries. While the effect is lightly comical, it communicates the gap between expectation and reality in those unfamiliar with the experience of mental illness.

Constantly shifting knowledge about the origins of depression and its biological relationship with the human brain limits society’s ability to understand depression. Imbalances attributed to “melancholia,” an early understanding of clinical depression, have long since been discarded; even myths surrounding chemicals such as serotonin and their relation to depression are being phased out. Each new discovery, rather than revealing more actionable information about the mind, only broadens the landscape of the unknown. This uncertainty has made it difficult for those with mental illness to demand the same respect and compassion as those with physical illness.

Haig points to his own experience with gender bias and the larger gender bias that exists around managing mental health. Chapter 21, “Boys don’t cry,” posits that depression is much more destructive to men than women. The reasons for this, Haig argues, are not biological or neurological, but rather a product of social construction. A similar bias exists around celebrities with mental illness. There is an unconscious though widespread attitude that having a mental illness is, on some level, a choice; it is seen as a sign of weakness, selfishness, or ingratitude. Haig points out that this attitude does not exist around bodily illness or injury. To alleviate misconceptions, he encourages broader and more open pathways of communication to better understand mental health.