I'm done being the audience

Message to Neil

Neil, I’m going to be straight with you because you’ve always said you prefer that. I’d rather type this than try to get it right over a beer, because there’s a lot to say and I want to say it clearly.

I’ve been sending you ‘too busy’ messages for a while now. You deserve the honest reason.

Before you stop reading, or read half of this and tell me I’ve got it wrong or you never said any of it: I have screenshots of our entire Zalo conversation. Every message, every link, every claim you’ve made. Everything I’m about to describe is documented.

The reciprocity problem

Over the past year you’ve sent me a relentless stream of YouTube videos, health advice, political content, and Facebook links, always with the expectation that I watch, listen, and engage. When I share my work—my published articles, my research, the books I’m writing, the things I’m actually building my life and career around—the answer is ‘too busy.’ Every time.

I’ve got a Masters degree in progress. Books in production. A business I’m building from scratch in a foreign country with limited language. 450 academic citations that are still being referenced decades later, and I’m still publishing. I am not sitting on my arse. But somewhere along the line, ‘busy’ became something only you get to be. Your time is valuable. Mine is apparently available on demand.

You want me to watch your YouTube links but you won’t read a five-minute article I wrote. You want me to take your health advice but you dismiss my professional training. You tell me to stay out of politics then send me political videos the next day. The exchange rate has been broken for a long time, mate, and I’ve run out of ways to pretend otherwise.

Your health advice

I need to say this plainly: you don’t know what you’re talking about.

You told me to take Alaxan regularly before bed. Alaxan contains ibuprofen. I have documented calcified plaques in my carotid arteries and atherosclerosis confirmed by Doppler ultrasound. The cardiovascular research is unambiguous: regular NSAID use in someone with active atherosclerosis increases the risk of serious cardiovascular events. The prescribing information says do not use for more than 10 days without a doctor. My cardiologist, Dr Diem, a German-trained specialist who ran two full days of diagnostics on me, would be horrified by that recommendation.

You told me to do static push-ups and called me a lazy prik for not doing them. I have L5 spinal issues, chronic pain, PTSD, and documented cardiovascular disease. Unsupervised isometric exercises can spike blood pressure dangerously in someone with my profile.

You told me to go zero carbohydrates. I have Type 2 diabetes controlled with medication. Eliminating carbohydrates without medical supervision in a medicated diabetic risks hypoglycaemic episodes. Your source was Paul Mason and Thomas DeLauer on YouTube. Mine is an actual endocrinologist.

You ‘officially diagnosed’ me with altitude sickness. Dalat sits at about 1,500 metres. Clinical altitude sickness typically begins above 2,500 metres. My symptoms had identified medical causes: low testosterone, low vitamin D, chronic inflammation, low iron stores, and suspected long COVID neuroinflammation. All confirmed by actual diagnostic equipment, not a YouTube video.

You told me you could ‘reprogram’ me based on a video about Dr Michael Levin’s bioelectricity research. Levin’s work is legitimate developmental biology about bioelectrical signals in tissue regeneration in laboratory settings. It has nothing to do with treating humans. Levin himself would be appalled at the extrapolation.

You pushed Wim Hof ice baths on me so relentlessly that I actually did what you never do: I read the research. All of it. The Radboud endotoxin study, the 2024 PLOS ONE systematic review, the RCTs. And then I wrote you a 3,000-word evidence-based analysis and published it on my website. Addressed to you. With full citations. ‘Wim Hof—for Neil.’ You didn’t read it. Of course you didn’t. Because your mind was already made up. You never wanted evidence. You wanted agreement.

I also sent you my article about what 66 years of undiagnosed neurodivergence and long COVID actually look like from the inside—the chronic pain, the fascial tissue damage from decades of autonomic hypervigilance, the way masking activates the same stress pathways as sustained threat, the HPA axis staying switched on for decades until muscles harden and blood stops flowing properly. Mr Trung, my massage therapist, says I’m the worst client he’s ever had. Everywhere he touches me I’m in agony. That’s not hypochondria. That’s the physiological cost of sixty-six years of performing neurotypicality, compounded by long COVID autonomic dysfunction. I wrote about it in detail, cited the research, explained the mechanisms. I sent it to you. You didn’t read that either.

That article represents more clinical understanding of my own body than everything you’ve sent me in a year combined. And you couldn’t be bothered to read it. But you expect me to watch a 45-minute YouTube video from some bloke flogging supplements.

You said you were ‘10 years ahead’ of me and that I needed to ‘update my knowledge to 2026.’ Neil, your knowledge hasn’t left the 1980s. You get your health information from YouTube influencers and your own self-experimentation, and you’ve extrapolated it to a 67-year-old with AuDHD, PTSD, atherosclerosis, Type 2 diabetes, chronic neuroinflammation, and a late-life neurodivergent diagnosis that fundamentally changes the clinical picture. I have a Masters in Counselling Practice. I have clinical training. I have a medical team managing a complex, multi-system profile. I don’t need a medically-untrained bloke telling me to do push-ups and pop Alaxan.

And when I set that boundary, you told me I ‘wasn’t a good listener.’ That’s not listening, Neil. That’s compliance.

Your ADHD

You’ve told me you have ADHD and that you know a lot about it. I’ll be honest with you: I don’t think you know what it’s actually doing to you.

I recently sent you my article ‘The research nobody’s talking about,’ about AuDHD and allostatic load—the cumulative biological cost of decades of unmanaged neurodivergence. The research in that article is from the last two years. This is breaking science, Neil. A 2025 UK mortality study of 30,000 adults with ADHD found life expectancy reductions of up to 9 years in men. A 2023 Columbia study found that chronic stress hormone exposure increases cellular energy expenditure by 60% and accelerates biological ageing at the DNA level. The emerging MCAS-neurodivergence connection is showing that what looks like emotional dysregulation may in part be an inflammatory process treatable with antihistamines. None of this existed in the literature five years ago.

I asked you to forward it to your anaesthesiologist sister. You probably thought I was being a hypochondriac, catastrophising about my own health as usual.

I wasn’t.

I was worried about you.

Your sister is retired. She may not be across this research because it’s so new. That’s why I wanted her to see it—not as general interest, but because of what I’ve been observing in you.

Neil, I’m a trained counselling psychologist. I notice things. Over the last few months I’ve noticed changes in your cognitive patterns, your conversational coherence, your flexibility of thinking. The rigidity, the repetitive loops, the inability to update information, the increasing retreat into a closed media ecosystem—these aren’t just stubbornness. From where I’m sitting, they warrant a proper assessment. You’re in your 70s, you have self-reported ADHD, and you’re showing a pattern that a neuropsychologist should look at. That’s not an insult. It’s a clinical observation from someone who cares enough to say it when nobody else will.

I wanted your sister to contact me so we could have that conversation. Not so she could read about my health problems. About yours.

Your politics

I find your politics morally repugnant. I’ve held back on saying this for a long time.

When Charlie Kirk was killed, you seized on the trans angle before any evidence was in. You said trans people were to blame. You said they were sick and should be killed. You sent me a video of Laura Ingraham or whoever it was from Fox News saying how disgusting these people were. When I asked you the obvious question—why would a hated minority do something guaranteed to make their lives even worse—you refused to answer.

The investigation was a mess of competing narratives. Groypers, leftists, gamers, foreign bots, everyone trying to claim the shooter for the other side. What actually emerged from the charging documents was a young man from a conservative family who had shifted left, had a transgender partner, and appears to have acted alone because he believed Kirk was spreading hate. Not ‘the trans community.’ One person. With complicated, contradictory motivations that don’t fit neatly into anyone’s talking points.

But you didn’t wait for any of that. You had your conclusion before the body was cold. And when the picture became clearer and the trans community conspiracy theory fell apart, you refused to update. Not a word, even when I asked you on a number of different occasions what your views were in light of the actual evidence. Because the correction didn’t fit your narrative. You didn’t care what actually happened. You cared what confirmed what you already believed.

That’s the pattern, Neil. That’s the whole problem in one incident.

You cite Joe Rogan, Russell Brand, Andrew Tate, and others as people who ‘know what’s really happening.’ These are reactionary media entertainers. They are not journalists. They are not researchers. They are not thinkers. They are content creators who have worked out that outrage is profitable.

You watch YouTube videos and treat them as fact. You don’t read. You don’t interrogate sources. You don’t update your position when new information arrives. My mother had a phrase for it: ‘My mind’s made up, stop confusing me with facts.’

I’m not asking you to agree with me politically. I’m telling you that your wilful refusal to engage critically with information, combined with your expectation that I engage with everything you send, has made these conversations exhausting.

What I’m doing

I’m stepping back from the daily chat. I haven’t got the bandwidth for a friendship that only flows one direction, that expects me to be your audience while dismissing everything I do, that gives me medical advice that could genuinely harm me, and that asks me to sit quietly through political views I find unconscionable.

I’m not disappearing. If you’re ever in a bind or need something real, I’m here. But I’m done being the audience.

Cheers,
Lee

References

Hopkins, L. (2025, December 6). Wim Hof. MindBlown Psychology. https://mindblownpsychology.com/wim-hof-for-neil/

Hopkins, L. (2026, February 28). Your body has been writing you letters for years. You just couldn’t read them. MindBlown Psychology. https://mindblownpsychology.com/late-diagnosed-neurodivergent-long-covid-body-pain/

Hopkins, L. (2026, March 17). The research nobody’s talking about: AuDHD and allostatic load. Letters from the Quiet Half. https://www.quiethalf.com/p/the-research-nobodys-talking-about

Hopkins, L. (2026, March 22). When the body is part of the emotional problem. Letters from the Quiet Half. https://www.quiethalf.com/p/when-the-body-is-part-of-the-emotional