Matt Haig

speaker

2,177 appearances 5 recordings 4 series first heard May 2026 last heard 18 Jun

Matt Haig’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 4.

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Off The Shelf with Morgann Book · #51: Why Matt Haig Reads 1-Star Reviews of The Midnight Library · 18 Jun 2026 podcast

I was just, everything was flooding in.

The sort of summer of sleep deprivation, the sort of low-level depression I'd had since a teenager.

And all those sort of mental health issues I hadn't been aware of or articulating to myself just sort of like burst up.

So I should have probably got help years before that, but being a young man in denial, I just didn't.

Yeah, I was in crisis mode.

I nearly literally threw myself off a cliff in Spain.

My girlfriend was terrified.

I was sort of in this kind of state where I couldn't speak.

I was shaking.

I was...

vomiting I was just like a mess and so I went to Spanish hospital and they prescribed me very strong diazepam and that made me even feel more detached and more weird and I flew home I was a mess for months and even years of like

swinging between panic and depression.

And so it was terrifying.

It was 24-7.

The thing people sometimes forget about mental illness is there's just no off switch.

So there was nothing I could do.

There wasn't even the option of getting drunk because I was terrified of anything that altered my mind.

So I was just in this state.

I couldn't even watch TV.

I couldn't even listen to music because anything that was vaguely stimulating would give me a panic attack.

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