The library is open—press play
Two AI voices talk each book through, start to finish, in about twenty minutes—machine-made, human-checked. Put one on and you'll know whether the book's for you.
Full disclosure, because it’s the whole point: these DeepDives are made with Google’s NotebookLM. I feed it the finished book and let two AI voices argue it out. I’m the bloke who wrote The Augmented Psychologist, so using the tools in the open is the brand, not a confession—and I listen to every episode before it goes up, which means what you’re hearing is machine-made and human-checked.
Press play on whichever one sounds like your particular flavour of trouble. If it lands, there’s a note at the bottom of this article on how to read the book itself.
Non-fiction
Embracing Neurodiversity (2nd edition)
A field guide to the whole neurodiverse crowd—autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia, and the rest of the family that won’t stay in its own lane. Rebuilt from inside a late diagnosis, every claim now sourced, with new chapters on the online noise and on what neurodivergence looks like where the word barely exists yet. The argument underneath: how well you cope is about the fit between your wiring and the room you were handed, not the wiring alone.
Best read if you’ve been handed a label and want the calm, referenced version of what it means—before the internet gets to it first.
Death of a Gentleman
The suffering that ends men is rarely the loud kind. It’s the quiet sort that works away over decades, below the threshold of notice, because it isn’t an event that happened to a man on a particular Tuesday; it’s the air he’s been breathing. This is a book about the operating system most Western men were issued young, the unspoken rules for what to do with feelings and money and women and failure and the body, and what happens when they’re still running it in a world that has quietly swapped out every environment it was built for. The argument, across fourteen chapters, is that a great many men aren’t broken. They’re mismatched: good software, wrong hardware, wrong country, wrong sky.
Best read if you’ve done everything you were told a man should, and still can’t work out why it’s costing you this much.
Understanding AuDHD (4th edition)
Completely rewritten. The science moved, the community moved, and the book moved with them. Fifteen chapters and six appendices built from the ground up on current research, emerging neurodivergent voices, and the things the earlier editions didn’t go far enough on. The core argument is sharper: AuDHD is an emergent neurological profile, not two conditions in a trench coat. The DSM still disagrees. The DSM is welcome to catch up.
Best read if the third edition helped you recognise yourself and you’re ready for the version that fights your corner with better evidence.
The Convenient Monster
Most public outrage focuses on villains. Monsters are easy to recognise and satisfying to condemn. Systems are slower, messier, and often implicate the people who benefit from them. So the monster becomes the explanation, and the system continues quietly doing its work.
Best read if you suspect some social problems survive because the story we tell about them is more comforting than the truth.
Note: The book goes deep into the illicit, underage sex trade. It is not a happy book and there are no jokes. It is also the book that cost me the most emotionally and intellectually, and the book of which I am most proud.
Harder Than It Should Be
Post-2020 life quietly dismantled the invisible support systems most of us were running on—the commute that processed the day, the office that externalised memory, the ambient contact of other bodies. When the scaffolding collapsed, the deficit showed up as a mysterious personal failing. It wasn’t.
Best read if you keep waiting to feel like yourself again and are starting to wonder if that’s still coming.
The Collapse of Knowledge
More information than ever, and less confidence in what to trust. For the clever-but-unsure—people who’d rather build their own footing than borrow certainty from louder voices.
Best read if you’re tired of hot takes and would like a calmer relationship with what counts as true.
The Body Remembers the Fire
What happens when PTSD intensity doesn’t resolve cleanly? Something burns through you, changes you, and then doesn’t quite leave—not as a memory you can tell or a lesson you can use, but as a trace in the body, a physiological echo, a shift in how the world lands.
Best read if you understand what happened, but your body clearly hasn’t got the memo yet.
It’s the Circumstances
Sometimes what looks like a failure of resilience or insight or upbringing is just an accurate read of the situation you’re being asked to survive. A grounded, slightly heretical take on depression that treats context as real and causal, not a footnote.
Best read if you suspect you’re reacting normally to an abnormal set of demands.
Misdiagnosed
When psychiatry mistakes neurodivergence for mental illness. Not a putdown of psychiatrists—most are doing their best with what they have. But the diagnostic tools haven’t kept pace with what’s actually known.
Best read if your psychiatrist is frustrated that you’re not responding to treatment the way the DSM expects.
The Augmented Psychologist
Technology doesn’t replace the human parts of psychology. It pressurises them. For clinicians and thoughtful clients who want to work with AI without outsourcing judgement, ethics, or responsibility.
Best read if you’re curious about AI, but you’d like to stay human on purpose.
You’re Not Imagining It, It IS This Weird
If modern life feels subtly hostile to your nervous system, you’re not alone and you’re not weak. A grounded companion for people tired of being told to optimise themselves out of exhaustion.
Best read if you feel like a functional adult on paper but privately exhausted by the whole arrangement.
Living with Bipolar II
Bipolar II is often mistaken for temperament, personality, or poor self-control. Clear, steady guidance for recognising patterns early and building stability without flattening your inner life.
Best read if your mood shifts are disruptive but subtle enough that people dismiss them, including you.
Fiction — The Expat Psychologist novels
Fracture
Book 1 of the series. Fracture is what happens before anyone admits something is broken. A psychological novel about slow collapse, professional identity, and the moment insight proves powerless against a body that has reached its limit.
Best read if you prefer your breakdowns gradual, believable, and quietly terrifying.
Memory
Book 2. After collapse, memory stops behaving politely. It loops, intrudes, vanishes at the wrong time, and returns without permission. A psychological novel about what survives after rupture, and how the past keeps rewriting the present.
Best read if you’re drawn to stories where the real antagonist is the mind trying to protect itself.
Tremor
Book 3. Professor Whitaker has built six months of careful stability in Đà Lạt. Then his hand starts shaking. Keys appear in the refrigerator with no memory of how they got there. It follows a man expert at diagnosing others who cannot see what is beginning to happen to him.
Best read if you know what it is to construct a careful life and feel it start to slip at the edges.
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