Category: AuDHD
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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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Deluded, or just early?
The DSM defines a delusion by one thing: a belief that won’t change when the evidence does. By that test, the people called deluded often weren’t—the institutions were
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The unpaid second job
I was sixty-six when a clinician finally used the right word, and my first feeling was not relief. It was closer to the feeling you get when an itemised bill arrives for a service you did not know you had been buying for thirty years. Borrowing a concept from an anthropologist who never wrote about…
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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 pattern was older than the rupture
There is a particular kind of grief that nobody has bothered to name, which means most people walk around carrying it while assuming they have indigestion. It happens when a long friendship ends badly. The grief that lingers is rarely about the final exchange. It is about the slow, embarrassed realisation that the rupture wasn’t…
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What happens when a neurodivergent man builds his own brain?
Jon Mick built a 90-table database of his own mind, published his MRI data, and open-sourced his cognitive architecture. Here’s what that means for the rest of us
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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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So you want to build something that doesn’t repeat the same mistakes
If you’re building something and you want it to be different from the organisations that failed you, Letters from the Quiet Half is where the honest version of that conversation happens. Research, clinical frameworks, no corporate motivational posters. Subscribe free: quiethalf.substack.com/subscribe
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When the workplace decides you’re the problem
If your career has been a long series of almost-but-not-quites, Letters from the Quiet Half was built for you. Research, clinical honesty, and the considerable relief of finding out the gap was never yours to fix alone. Subscribe free: quiethalf.substack.com/subscribe
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The book the DSM still isn’t ready for
Download the completely rewritten fourth edition of Understanding AuDHD for free as a paid subscriber to ‘Letters from the Quiet Half’, with full access to the curated book library and an embedded DeepDive podcast episode
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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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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
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Doing less without disappearing
Living with an ADHD and autistic brain often means having more ideas than energy This reflective essay explores why doing less is not failure but a necessary response to nervous system depletion burnout and the quiet work of recovery in a culture addicted to productivity
