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My Latest Book
Better To Live
How I Learnt To Survive Depression
by
Alastair Campbell
"Superbly readable, supremely useful. Unflinching, clear-eyed, honest, raw and revealing, it may be the most important achievement of Alastair Campbell’s vivid and varied life. This book could save lives." – STEPHEN FRY
BETTER TO LIVE is Alastair Campbell’s honest, moving and life affirming account of his lifelong struggle with depression. It is an autobiographical, psychological and psychiatric study, which explores his own childhood, family and other relationships, and examines the impact of his professional and political life on himself and those around him. But it also lays bare his relentless quest to understand depression not just through his own life but through different treatments. Every bit as direct and driven, clever and candid as he is, this is a book filled with pain, but also hope - he examines how his successes have been in part because of rather than despite his mental health problems - and love. His partner of forty years, Fiona Millar, writes a moving afterword on how she too has learned to live with his depression.
Depression is the predominant mental health problem worldwide - it is estimated that 1 in 6 people in the past week experienced a common mental health problem and major depression is thought to be the second leading cause of disability worldwide. BETTER TO LIVE is a call to arms and an extraordinary memoir in one compelling and inspiring narrative. This is a book that really could save lives.
"One can only hope that BETTER TO LIVE provokes a far wider and more honest understanding of the condition" – JON SNOW
It never fails to fascinate me how the most incongruous events in life can lead you in directions you never intended to pursue. How I found myself here, spending an hour at 05:30 on a Saturday morning, watching an interview with John Bercow, is too long a story of the twists and turns of a constantly searching mind that wakes too early and wonders too much. Suffice to say that I enjoyed the interview enormously and I’m really pleased to have discovered this site. But that’s not to say that I won’t have moved on to other worlds and other websites and forgotten all about you by the time I’ve finished breakfast.