I’m Lee Hopkins. I’m a counselling psychologist, a writer, and a 60-something-year-old Australian who lives in Đà Lạt, a small city in the Vietnamese highlands where the temperature behaves itself and the coffee is taken seriously.
I came here about twelve months ago, after a long stretch in Adelaide where the work was good and the body wasn’t. The move was a deliberate environmental intervention, not a midlife flourish. The body has since done quite a lot better. So has the writing.
Most of the writing is about why people end up depleted, miscategorised, or quietly performing wellness they don’t feel. Some of it is about neurodivergence, which I came to late. I was diagnosed AuDHD—autism plus ADHD—at sixty-six, after several decades of being told it was Bipolar II and being treated for that instead. The diagnosis didn’t fix anything, but it did rearrange the furniture. A lot of things I’d been quietly carrying turned out to have names.
Before any of this I was an online and social media evangelist. From 1998 to 2001 I spent a lot of time talking to CEOs about why they needed a website when they had a fax machine and couldn’t see how a website would add value. From around 2005 I spent the better part of a decade doing keynotes, training corporate communicators, and explaining what a Twitter was and why it was so important to people who were quite sure they didn’t need it. I founded Adelaide’s Social Media Club. I travelled parts of the world, was published widely, cited respectably, and burned out comprehensively.
I registered leehopkins.com in March 2001, which makes the domain older than Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, WordPress, and the iPod. It has outlasted three careers, two countries, and several versions of me.
There’s a story in there about what happens when the work you’re known for stops fitting the person you’ve become. I’ll get to it eventually.
Earlier still, I served in the RAAF from 1981 to 1987. That’s relevant mainly because veterans turned out to be the population I cared most about clinically. My Master’s research focused on depression and bipolar in veterans, which is a polite way of describing a small group of men who’d been told for years to manage symptoms that were largely environmental in origin. The pattern wasn’t unique to them, as it happened.
The credentials, since people occasionally ask: a BSc with Honours in Applied Psychology and Sociology, a Diploma in Business Management, and a Master of Counselling Practice. The undergraduate Honours work was on the psychological contract—the unwritten agreement between employer and employee about what each owes the other—and the resulting research has somehow accumulated more than 450 academic citations over the intervening decades, which is flattering but mostly tells you something about how slowly organisational psychology moves.
These days I write books. Forty-something at last count, across psychology, neurodivergence, memoir, and a nine-book fiction series set in the streets and coffee shops of Đà Lạt. The most recent ones include Harder Than It Should Be, on cognitive fatigue and the post-COVID nervous system, and Understanding AuDHD, now in its fourth edition. There’s also The Convenient Monster, which is the only book I’ve written without humour, and which I won’t say more about here.
I write in a few places. The longer essays live at mindblownpsychology.com. The midweek and weekend pieces, plus access to the full book library for paid subscribers, live at The Quiet Half on Substack. The books are on Amazon. The professional writing work, when I take it, sits at leehopkinswriter.com.
This site is the place where all of that converges. If you’ve Googled my name and ended up here, you’re probably looking for a way to read the work, buy a book, or get in touch. The links above will do the first two. My email address handles the third.
If you want the full clinical and academic credentials, the achievements page has them. If you’d rather just read something, the writing is where I’d start.
— Lee