Category: Anxiety and stress
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Twenty years under the wrong word
For twenty years I was filed under the wrong diagnosis. At sixty-six the right one arrived: autistic, ADHD, one nervous system. MISREAD, my book on building a life from what was already working, goes live on Kindle and everywhere else on 5 December
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What raging against the dying of the light actually looks like
I have had a month that tried to put my light out: a move, a cancer scare, a body in revolt, and the grief of finishing a book about grief. My mood is a two out of ten. Here is why that is an accurate reading, not a failing
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The room that shows no profit
A culture built on return on investment sends an accountant through the house of your life, pricing every room by its yield. The room that only keeps you well reads on his form as waste. For a brain that needs several such rooms, that is a diagnosis waiting to happen.
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The doctor’s blood pressure is the one nobody takes
White coat hypertension has a name, a protocol and a home cuff. The doctor’s version, in which certainty rises the moment the coat goes on, has none. A 67-year-old patient in Đà Lạt on rolled eyes, one doctor who listened, and what unheard pain costs an older body
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On the anniversary of the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide report (Australia, 2024)
Today marks the anniversary of Australia’s Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide. A year on, nothing has moved for veterans still waiting on claims, assessed against a DSM its own former NIMH director called invalid, propped up by a serotonin theory the evidence never actually supported
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Nobody ever checked whether my two eyes agree
Lindsey Mackereth has a hypothesis: that a brain which had to work at fusing two disagreeing images may be a brain that never learned to stop watching itself. She is careful about what it does and does not claim, which is exactly why it is worth reading
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You cannot reframe your way out of a filing cabinet
Two rats get identical shocks. One has a wheel that works. Weeks later only one of them is broken, and the difference was never mindset. What the controllability literature says about surviving an institution that will not answer you, and why reframing is the wrong target
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The colours of noise: sorting real science from wellness-industry hiss
White noise, pink noise, brown, green — the wellness aisle has worked out how to sell you silence by the colour, with a subscription. Some of it is real. Most of it isn’t what the label claims. A counselling psychologist sorts the four into their proper boxes
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The gut punch is real. The manual just hasn’t caught up.
The gut punch of rejection is real: your brain files it under bodily injury, not bad mood. But ‘RSD’ is a clinical coinage the literature hasn’t ratified yet, and that gap says more about psychiatry’s slow paperwork than about anything broken in you
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It wasn’t the last straw
The straw never breaks the camel’s back. The load does. The straw just arrives last and gets the blame. I wrote about my own collapse this week—a full-blown panic attack—and why veteran PTSD, autistic burnout and perimenopause turn out to be the same story wearing different clothes: accumulation, with no recovery in between. The science…
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The blazer is doing more work than you think
A few days ago I read a piece by Lindsey Mackereth called “Perfectionism Is Just RSD in a Blazer,” and it has been bothering me in the good way ever since. She’s mostly right. She also stops short of where the argument actually goes.
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The body keeps the invoice
The universe spent 13.8 billion years producing a nervous system capable of abstract thought, and you’ve spent the last forty years running it on emergency power. The research says the invoice can start being paid down. Here’s what actually works
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Message to Neil
If this letter landed somewhere familiar, you’re not alone. One-way friendships drain neurodivergent people faster than most. Subscribe to my Substack channel for writing that names the things polite society pretends not to notice, from a psychologist who has stopped pretending
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Why the monster myth is the most dangerous idea in child protection
If you’ve ever wondered why decades of prosecution, rescue operations, and awareness campaigns haven’t reduced the sexual exploitation of children, The Convenient Monster argues the answer is uncomfortable, systemic, and closer to home than anyone wants to admit
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Your body has been writing you letters for years. You just couldn’t read them
If decades of masking and the invisible weight of long COVID have left your body keeping a score nobody told you about, you are not imagining it. Lee Hopkins is a psychologist and late-diagnosed AuDHD adult who understands what you are going through from the inside out
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When the body keeps the score of a lifetime of masking
Chronic physical pain can emerge after years of neurodivergent masking because the nervous system and body absorb prolonged stress responses. When identity strain, social pressure and self-criticism accumulate over decades, the body may eventually signal overload through fatigue, tension and pain
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When a messaging app becomes a diagnostic tool
Had enough of dietary evangelists diagnosing your health problems through Instagram? Share this with anyone who’s tired of being lectured about their “systematic abuse” of their body by amateur nutritionists with messiah complexes
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Misdiagnosis nearly killed me
A personal and clinical account of misdiagnosis, neurodivergence, environment, and augmentation. Three books form one argument: mental health fails when behaviour is mistaken for architecture, context is ignored, and clinicians lose the bandwidth to remain curious
