About Lee Hopkins

I’m a 66-year-old Australian psychologist living in Da Lat, Vietnam, and that geographical detail matters more than you might think.

For decades, I lived with depression whilst working in systems that treated it as a personal failing rather than a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances. I tried medication, therapy, positive thinking, resilience training—all the things we’re told will fix us.

What actually worked? Changing my environment.

I moved from Adelaide to Vietnam in 2025, and something shifted. My photography went from moody black-and-white to vibrant colour. Not as metaphor—as evidence. Same brain. Different system. Different outcome.

That’s what I bring to counselling: a deep suspicion of approaches that ask you to optimise yourself to fit systems that might be crushing you. I’m less interested in teaching you resilience and more interested in questioning whether the thing you’re trying to be resilient to is actually worth adapting to.

I work primarily with people dealing with:

Neurodiversity (Autism, ADHD, AuDHD) and the exhaustion of masking
Depression that might be environmental rather than chemical
Bipolar disorder (I’ve written about Bipolar II)
Anxiety and stress that come from systemic mismatch
Loss and grief
The gap between who you are and who systems demand you be

I’m a fan of Adlerian psychology and Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT) because they focus on what’s possible rather than what’s broken. I’m deeply suspicious of Positive Psychology and the optimization trap that tells people they can think their way out of material circumstances.

My approach combines academic rigour (Honours in Applied Psychology, Masters in Counselling Practice, 450+ academic citations) with lived experience of systemic crushing and environmental transformation. I write books about psychology, systems, and why your brain might be fine even when the world around you isn’t.

I counsel online from Da Lat, Vietnam, working with people across time zones who are questioning whether the problem is them or the circumstances they’re trying to survive in.

Usually, it’s the circumstances.

Academic credentials (for those who care about such things)

My research on psychological contracts in organisational psychology has gathered 450+ citations over the past 25+ years. The main paper—co-authored with Lynne Millward at the University of Surrey—explored how temporary employment contracts reshape the psychological relationship between workers and organisations.

For context: most academic papers never break 10 citations. Many gather zero. Getting into the hundreds means the work contributed something that other researchers found useful enough to build on.

450 citations won’t get you a Nobel Prize, but it’s solid evidence that the research mattered to people studying organisational behaviour, commitment, and the changing nature of work.

Here’s what’s more interesting than the number itself: the paper was published in 1998, and researchers are still citing it in 2025. That’s unusual. Most papers get cited heavily for a few years, then fade. This one keeps getting referenced because the questions it asked—about what happens to loyalty and commitment when organisations stop promising security—turned out to be increasingly relevant as the employment landscape shifted.

The work explored whether people on temporary contracts form different psychological relationships with their employers than permanent workers do. Turns out they do. Temporary workers tend towards transactional thinking—”I’ll do the work, you’ll pay me”—rather than relational thinking—”we’re in this together long-term.”

That finding holds up across industries and countries, which is why people keep citing it.

I moved on from academic research decades ago. These days I write books, counsel people, and explore what happens when you change your environment rather than endlessly optimising yourself. But the citations remain, evidence that questioning conventional assumptions about work and commitment struck a chord with people studying those same questions.

Millward, L. J., & Hopkins, L. J. (1998). Psychological Contracts, Organizational and Job Commitment. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28, 1530-1556

Millward, L.J., & Hopkins, L.J. (1998). Organizational Commitment and the Psychological Contract. Journal of Social and Applied Psychology. 28(16) 16-31

Millward, L.J. & Hopkins, L.J. (1997). A psychological contract and identification model of risk ownership. International Journal of Project and Business Risk Management. July, 111-120

Hopkins, L.J., & Millward, L.J. (1997). Measuring Information Performance. Invited paper presented at the Maximising Information Performance (Euromapping) Conference, June 2-3rd, 1997, London

Millward, L.J., & Hopkins, L.J. (1997). Organisational Commitment and the Psychological Contract. Paper presented at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference at The Edinburgh Conference Centre, April 1997

Hopkins, L.J., & Millward, L.J. (1997). Perceptions of the employment contract: core and peripheral workers. Paper presented at the British Psychological Society Annual Conference at The Edinburgh Conference Centre, April 1997

Millward, L.J., & Hopkins, L.J. (1996) Organisational Change and the psychological contract. Interactive poster presentation at the XXVI International Congress in Psychology, Montreal, August 16-21, 1996

Hopkins, L.J. (2008) 3D virtual environments: businesses are ready but are our ‘digital natives’ prepared for the changing landscape? Proceedings of the 25th Annual ASCILITE Conference, Melbourne, Victoria.

B.Sc. (Hons) Applied Psychology & Sociology, University of Surrey, UK, specialising in Social Psychology;
Diploma of Management Studies, Brunel University, UK;
Masters of Counselling Practice, Tabor College, Adelaide, South Australia, specialising in CBT, ACT, Grief & Loss, and help for military veterans re-entering civilian life;
Master of Creative Writing & Communication, Tabor College, Adelaide, South Australia (in final year).