Reasons to Stay Alive (HC) Read Online Free PDF

likely to seek and receive treatment for mental health problems than men.
    The risk of developing depression is about 40 per cent if a biological parent has been diagnosed with the illness.
    Sources: World Health Organization, the Guardian , Mind, Black Dog Institute.

The head against the window
    I WAS IN my parents’ bedroom. On my own. Andrea was downstairs, I think. Anyway, she wasn’t with me. I was standing by the window with my head against the glass. It was one of those times when the depression was there on its own, uncoloured by anxiety. It was October. The saddest of months. My parents’ street was a popular route into town, so there were a few people walking along the pavement. Some of these people I knew or recognised from my childhood, which had only officially ended six years before. Though maybe it hadn’t ended at all.
    When you are at the lowest ebb, you imagine – wrongly – that no one else in the world has felt so bad. I prayed to be those people. Any of them. The eighty-year-olds, the eight-year-olds, the women, the men, even their dogs. I craved to exist in their minds. I could not cope with the relentless self-torment any more than I could cope with my hand on a hot stove when I could see buckets of iceall around me. Just the sheer exhaustion of never being able to find mental comfort. Of every positive thought reaching a cul-de-sac before it starts.
    I cried.
    I had never been one of those males who were scared of tears. I’d been a Cure fan, for God’s sake. I’d been emo before it was a term. Yet weirdly, depression didn’t make me cry that often, considering how bad it was. I think it was the surreal nature of what I was feeling. The distance. Tears were a kind of language and I felt all language was far away from me. I was beneath tears. Tears were what you shed in purgatory. By the time you were in hell it was too late. The tears burnt to nothing before they began.
    But now, they came. And not normal tears either. Not the kind that start behind the eyes. No. These came from the deep. They seemed to come from my gut, my stomach was trembling so much. The dam had burst. And once they came they couldn’t stop, even when my dad walked into the bedroom. He looked at me and he couldn’t understand, even though it was all too familiar. My mum had suffered from post-natal depression. He came over to me, and saw my face, and the tears were contagious. His eyes went pink and watery. I couldn’t remember the last timeI’d seen him cry. He said nothing at first but hugged me, and I felt loved, and I tried to gather as much of that love as I could. I needed all of it.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I think I said.
    ‘Come on,’ he said, softly. ‘You can do this. Come on. You can pull yourself together, Mattie. You’re going to have to.’
    My dad wasn’t a tough dad. He was a gentle, caring, intelligent dad, but he still didn’t have the magical ability to see inside my head.
    He was right, of course, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to say much else, but he had no idea as to how hard that sounded.
    To pull myself together.
    No one did. From the outside a person sees your physical form, sees that you are a unified mass of atoms and cells. Yet inside you feel like a Big Bang has happened. You feel lost, disintegrated, spread across the universe amid infinite dark space.
    ‘I’ll try, Dad, I’ll try.’
    They were the words he wanted to hear so I gave him them. And I returned to staring out at those ghosts of my childhood.

Pretty normal childhood
    DOES MENTAL ILLNESS just happen, or is it there all along? According to the World Health Organization nearly half of all mental disorders are present in some form before the age of fourteen.
    When I became ill at twenty-four it felt like something terribly new and sudden. I had a pretty normal, ordinary childhood. But I never really felt very normal. (Does anyone?) I usually felt anxious.
    A typical memory would be me as a ten-year-old, standing on the