The year I forgot to be depressed

A year ago today, I landed in Đà Lạt with a suitcase, a draft manuscript, and a diagnosis I no longer believed in. This is what the next twelve months actually looked like.

Twelve months in the fog

The fog comes down over Đà Lạt most mornings the way the truth does—without announcement, without theatrics, just a quiet greying-out of the things you thought you could see. By eight o’clock it has usually lifted. By eight-thirty you can pretend it was never there. The locals don’t comment on it because the fog is not the story. The fog is the medium through which the day arrives.

I have been living inside this metaphor for twelve months and I am only now starting to notice it.

I want to tell this year accurately, because the version of it that wants to get told—the cinematic version, where I arrive in Vietnam and a Vietnamese psychiatrist diagnoses me within an hour and the new life begins on the tarmac—is wrong in every particular except the emotional shape of it. The actual story is messier, more economic, more accidental, and more interesting than the cinematic version. I am going to try to tell the actual one.

The diagnosis

The diagnosis happened in Adelaide. On a video call. Sitting at home because coffee shop meetings were not in the budget.

The psychologist on the other end of the call was Gaye, my Brisbane-based professional friend, who had known me long enough to have witnessed the whole psychiatric catastrophe: the depression, the bipolar diagnosis, the medications that turned me into sentient furniture, the disability pension, the business failures, the entire collection of labels accumulated across four decades. She had also been, for all of that time, my DVA-appointed psychologist. She knew the file. She had read the chapters of the file I hadn’t yet read myself.

Somewhere between sips of instant coffee, the real stuff being another budget casualty by that point, she tilted her head and asked the question that nobody else had thought to ask in forty years of clinical encounters.

Has it occurred to you that you might be neurodivergent?

I laughed. Properly laughed.

I’m not autistic, I said. I was in the RAAF. I ran businesses. I’ve presented to international audiences. I understand sarcasm better than most people understand basic mathematics. Autistic people don’t do those things.

She did not laugh back. She walked me through adult autism criteria, particularly for people who’d learned to mask for survival, and then through ADHD criteria for people who don’t bounce off walls because they’ve spent lifetimes developing internal management systems and sitting on their hands. Every single point matched. By the end of the call I was sixty-five years old and had finally been asked the right question, and the answers had reorganised themselves the way answers do when the question is finally correctly framed.

That was the diagnostic moment. Adelaide. Video call. A friend. No psychiatrist. No clinic. No ceremony. Official diagnosis was financially impossible, since disability pensions don’t stretch to comprehensive neuropsychological assessment, but Gaye is like one of the best courtroom lawyers—she never asks a question she doesn’t already have the answer to. So, Gaye did what all the very best therapists and psychologists do: pose the question and let me do the discovery. Gaye knew full well that I would ‘deep dive’ into the literature and the science, then come to my own conclusions.

Once I had gone on that journey into late-diagnosed adults, the science confirmed what had become impossible to unsee. AuDHD. Custom brain firmware that nobody had mentioned in the documentation. Which, amusingly enough, makes me a limited edition collector’s item in the neurodiverse firmament, allegedly.

I want to be specific about what that felt like, because the version that gets told in neurodivergence memoirs tends to skip the part I want to name. It did not feel like liberation. It felt like an itemised invoice for forty years of paid-for damage, suddenly arriving in the post with a note attached saying we regret to inform you that the original supplier was incorrect.

I sat with that invoice for several months. I am still sitting with it.

The move

The move to Vietnam was not romantic. It was not the next chapter of the diagnostic story. It was economic.

By 2025, Adelaide had evolved into a prison I couldn’t afford to escape from or die in. The disability pension covered survival, barely. Coffee shop meetings had become unaffordable. I was eating church charity food because supermarkets had become unaffordable. I had, at one earlier point, calculated my own departure with the methodical attention I brought to business planning, and had been saved from it only by the fact that the location and method I’d chosen cost more than my bank account could manage. Sometimes poverty saves you in ways that positive thinking never could.

Vietnam offered a solution to the practical problem. It was warm, it was cheap, and it was sufficiently far from everyone who had witnessed my various failures. I was not seeking enlightenment or cultural enrichment or meaningful personal growth. I was seeking accommodation that didn’t require choosing between housing and food. Đà Lạt, population approximately 400,000, altitude 1,500 metres, average temperature pleasant enough that freezing to death was no longer a budget consideration.

I arrived on a Friday evening in May 2025 with one suitcase and five days booked into a cheap hotel. I did not yet know Hương. I would meet her later, here, in Đà Lạt, in the way that lives get rebuilt: slowly, locally, in the actual streets you happen to be walking down at the time.

The first months followed the expected pattern. Culture shock. Language barriers. Novel ways to misunderstand social expectations involving chairs, shoes, and which corner of a restaurant table outranks which other corner. I assumed the usual homesickness would settle into familiar depression, just with better weather and more affordable beer.

Three months in, something peculiar happened.

I realised I’d forgotten to be depressed.

Not cured, not joyful—just unladen. Like discovering someone had quietly removed a small persistent weight you had grown so accustomed to carrying that you’d forgotten it was removable. I waited for the depression to return. Old companions usually do. Instead, the colours returned to my photographs.

I had been documenting my own neurological state for seventeen years through a camera, without knowing that was what I was doing. The Adelaide archive was monochrome landscapes, moody, empty of humans. Within months of arriving in Đà Lạt the same camera in the same hands started producing markets, faces, reds, yellows, the kind of compositional generosity that my Adelaide perception had filed under non-essential luxury item, discontinue during survival mode. Same brain. Same equipment. Different environment. Radically different output.

That was the cure that decades of psychiatric intervention had not managed to produce. It cost me a one-way airfare and a willingness to be poor in a different country. It did not cost a single additional milligram of medication.

The two diagnoses, in order

So this is the actual sequence, for the record, because I have seen it told the wrong way around.

First, in Adelaide, before the move: Gaye asked the question, the answers reorganised themselves, AuDHD became the working frame.

Then, in Đà Lạt, after the move: the environment demonstrated, accidentally, that Adelaide had been the problem all along. Same brain in different conditions. The depression I had been treated for across three decades (and had endured all my life—I even faked my own suicide at 7 years of age) evaporated within a season of being moved to a country whose social, sensory, and economic conditions happened to match how my brain actually worked. It turns out the most effective antidepressant available to me was, by some considerable margin, a passport stamp.

The two events are not the same event. They are connected, but they are sequential, and the order matters. The diagnostic insight came from a friend who knew me. The environmental confirmation came from a city I had moved to for unrelated reasons. Neither would have produced the year I have just had without the other, but I want to be specific about which one was Gaye and which one was Đà Lạt, because conflating them flattens both.

The cost

I have been avoiding this section, which is how I know it needs to be written.

The diagnosis arrived at sixty-five. That number is not interesting in itself. What is interesting is the arithmetic underneath it: sixty years, give or take, of running a nervous system on the wrong assumptions about what nervous systems are supposed to do. Sixty years of compensation, suppression, mimicry, recalibration, and the daily, unglamorous work of pretending to be a slightly different person than the one I actually was, in order to be allowed to stay in the room.

The clinical term for this is allostatic load. I wrote a book about it earlier this year, so I will not relitigate the mechanism here. The shorter version is that the body keeps a running tally of what it costs to override itself, and it sends the bill eventually, and the bill is not optional. My bill arrived in instalments across four decades, dressed up as depression, bipolar, business failure, exhaustion, and a long sequence of relationships that ended for reasons I could not properly name at the time.

I have been angry about this. I want to say that plainly, because the genre wants me to say I have made peace with it, and I have not. I have made functional accommodation with it. Those are different things.

The anger is specific. It is not generalised rage at psychiatry or at Australia or at the medical-industrial complex, although there is some of all of that available if you would like it. The anger is at the specific waste. At the man who spent his thirties believing the problem was character. At the man who spent his forties believing the problem was discipline. At the man who spent his fifties believing the problem was choices. None of those men were correct. All of those men were tired in a way that no amount of character, discipline, or choice could fix, because the thing that needed fixing was a question nobody had asked them.

The grief is harder to write about than the anger, because grief about a life that did not happen is structurally awkward. There is no funeral for the version of you that never got built. There is just the slow recognition, in your sixties, of the careers that branched away from you because masking is metabolically expensive and metabolically expensive people make bad employees, the friendships that thinned because keeping up the act in social settings is the most exhausting work there is, the relationships that ended because the person you were performing was easier to fall in love with than the person you actually were, and you ran out of energy to maintain the performance roughly the same week the relationship needed maintaining.

I do not want to overdo this. The version of the essay that makes me look heroically wounded is available, and I am not going to write it. But I owe my readers, and I owe the versions of me sitting in 1989 and 1996 and 2004 and 2015 wondering why everything was harder than it should be, the courtesy of naming what the cost actually was.

There is also survivor’s guilt, which is the part I have been most reluctant to put on the page. I got out. I got Gaye’s question. I got the move. I got the year I have just had. The friends I left in Adelaide who are also late-identified neurodivergent and cannot afford the airfare did not get those things. The readers who write to me in their fifties and sixties saying I recognised myself in your book and I do not know what to do with that information did not get those things. Most of the people for whom my work is most useful do not have a Gaye, and cannot move to Đà Lạt, and have to keep showing up to whatever Adelaide they happen to be in. I think about this a lot. I do not have a tidy resolution for it.

What could my life have been if someone had asked Gaye’s question in 1970, when I was twelve and already exhausted? I do not know. The honest answer is that I do not get to know. The man who would have grown up with that question answered is not the man writing this. There is no recoverable version of him. There is only this version, who got the question late, used what was left of his energy to do something with the answer, and is trying to be useful to other people who got the question late or have not yet been asked it at all.

That is what I have to offer. It is not what I would have chosen if I had been given the choice. I was not given the choice.

I am here now. The fog still lifts at eight-thirty.

The money

There is a section every honest essay about depression eventually has to write, and it is the section about money. I have been writing about this professionally for years and I have watched the entire counselling profession step around it the way a polite dinner guest steps around the dog that has just thrown up on the carpet.

The elephant in the counselling room is not childhood. It is not unprocessed trauma. It is not negative self-talk. It is the bill on the kitchen table that the client has not opened because opening it will not change the fact that there is no money to pay it. We are extraordinarily well-trained, as a profession, at exploring the symbolic meaning of the unpaid bill. We are extraordinarily badly trained at acknowledging that the unpaid bill is a real bill, owed to a real organisation, that will trigger real consequences if it remains unpaid, and that this fact alone is sufficient to produce the symptoms our textbooks list under depression.

I want to say plainly what changed when I moved.

In Adelaide, in the last eighteen months before I left, the disability pension covered survival on a margin so thin that any unscheduled cost was a crisis. A flat tyre was a crisis. A dental appointment was a crisis. A friend asking if I wanted to grab a coffee at the cafe down the road was a crisis, because the coffee was five dollars and five dollars was either electricity or food and I had not yet decided which. I started declining invitations because saying yes meant calculating, and the calculating was more exhausting than the loneliness.

Loneliness is what the literature calls it. The literature is being polite. What it actually is, in practice, is the slow social erosion of a person who can no longer afford to participate in the ordinary economic exchanges that hold ordinary friendships together. You stop being invited because you have stopped accepting. You stop accepting because you cannot afford to accept. The friendships do not end dramatically. They thin. They thin in a specific direction, and the direction is downward.

In Đà Lạt, with the same disability pension, the situation is different. Not abundant. Different. A coffee at a local cafe costs the equivalent of one Australian dollar. When Hương suggests we eat at the place around the corner, I say yes without calculating. When the electricity bill arrives I pay it on the day it arrives. When something breaks I get it fixed. When a friend visits from Australia I can take them to dinner without the dinner being the entire week’s discretionary spend. None of this is wealth. All of it is the absence of the specific grinding arithmetic that had been running, undeclared, in the background of every social interaction I had in Adelaide for the previous decade.

This is what the counselling profession does not want to say out loud, and I am going to say it because I am sixty-seven years old and unemployed by anyone in particular and there is no career incentive left to be diplomatic about it. A great deal of what gets diagnosed as depression in low-income adults is actually the cumulative cognitive and physiological cost of constant financial threat. We medicate it because medicating it is reimbursable. We do not address the financial threat because the financial threat is a structural condition that no individual clinician can solve in a fifty-minute session. So we treat the symptom and bill the patient and call it healthcare.

I am not saying every depression is poverty. I am saying that the entire profession has a systematic blind spot at the intersection of mental health and economic precarity, and that the blind spot is convenient because acknowledging it would require admitting that a substantial portion of what we treat is iatrogenic to the system that funds the treating.

The seismic shift of this year is not that I have become wealthy. I have not. The seismic shift is that I have escaped the version of poverty that produces the symptoms my profession has trained me to call depression. I am still on the disability pension. I will be on it until I die. But the pension stretches differently in a country where five-dollar coffees do not exist, and the difference between a pension that stretches and a pension that does not is, it turns out, the entire difference between wanting to die and wanting to write.

I am aware this is not available to most people. I am aware that telling someone in Adelaide to move to Vietnam is roughly as useful as telling them to acquire a different family of origin. The point of writing this section is not to recommend the solution. The point is to name the mechanism, in print, so that the next clinician who sits across from a depressed client and asks them about their childhood might consider, even briefly, asking about their bank account first.

The library

There is a part of the year that does not fit inside the rest of the year, and that is the writing. Twelve books in twelve months. It happened in parallel with everything else, alongside the move, the diagnosis settling, the relationship, the legal matter, and it kept the rest of the year from collapsing rather than compounding the collapse. People who know me better than I know myself have told me this, repeatedly, and I am inclined to believe them.

I am going to lay out the library properly, because vagueness in this section is the kind of thing that gives the rest of the essay away. These are the books that sit across this twelve months, in different states of completion, with the descriptions I write for the library at quiethalf.com.

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.

Harder Than It Should Be. Post-COVID 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, less confidence in what to trust. A book for people who feel intelligent but increasingly unsure, and want a way to think clearly without borrowing 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. My account of C-PTSD from the inside. What happens when intensity doesn’t resolve cleanly. When something burns through you, changes you, and then doesn’t quite leave. Not as a story, not as a lesson, but as a trace. 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 the problem isn’t resilience, insight, or childhood. It’s the situation you’re trying 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, since 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.

Embracing Neurodiversity. For people who have spent years adapting, masking, and self-correcting without knowing why it costs so much. Relief from deficit thinking and the exhausting assumption that the problem is always you, not the environment built around you. Best read if you’re tired of being treated like a problem to be fixed.

Death of a Gentleman. Launches at the end of this month. A first-person exploration of masculinity through the lens of spectacular failure, mental health crises, and eventual reconstruction. Uses my journey from depression and financial ruin to contentment in Vietnam as a case study for how men might navigate a world where traditional masculine scripts no longer work—and maybe never did. Some writers will hate this. Several already do. I am sympathetic to the discomfort and unmoved by the argument.

Menopause Only Lasts One Day. Co-written with Gaye, in active drafting, launching at the end of July. Two psychologists, one clinical and women- and veteran-focused, the other systemic and partner-focused, writing about the same physiological process from inside opposite vantage points. It has been the most fun I have had writing in years. Best read if you are going through it, watching someone go through perimenopause, or have already been through it and want a version that doesn’t pretend it lasts a day.

The Vietnamese translation of Understanding AuDHD (third edition) sits alongside the English library, completed and ready for publication this year. There are now Vietnamese-language readers reading my work for the first time. People who would know tell me the translation is good. I am very pleased to have been told this.

That is the library. The full thing lives at quiethalf.com if you ever want to see the rest of the shelf.

The relationship

It is the part I have been least sure how to write about, partly because the relationship is recent enough that it does not yet have the kind of settled narrative that years of shared history produce. Hương and I met after I arrived in Đà Lạt. We have built what we have built locally, in the actual streets and the actual houses of a hill town in the Vietnamese central highlands, in the slow accumulation of daily evenings that is what relationships are actually made of when nobody is watching.

In late March 2026, the relationship came close to ending. There were financial misalignments we had not properly named. There was a conversation about money and futures that should have happened earlier and went badly when it did. There was a communication breakdown that revealed how much we had each been carrying in private, in two different languages, about each other’s cultures, for longer than was wise. We videoed with a couples counsellor and worked through enough of it to know whether there was a relationship to repair. There was. We repaired it.

The repair is not complete. Repairs of this kind usually aren’t, in my professional experience, and certainly aren’t in my personal one. What we have now is more honest than what we had two months ago, which is what repair is supposed to produce. The financial transparency document we drafted as part of the repair has its own ungainly title—Team HươngLee Financial Future—and exists because both of us needed it to exist. It is, in its own quiet way, one of the most important documents I have written this year.

I am extremely lucky. I know this.

The friendships

Some held. Some didn’t.

Gaye in Brisbane, who started this whole thing by asking the right question on a video call and is now my co-author, became closer through weekly video calls that I look forward to in a way that I do not look forward to most things. Steve Davis in Adelaide stayed Steve Davis, which is high praise. The Hosking family—Brett, Grant—stayed the Hosking family. My sister-from-another-missus-and-mister stayed my sister. Annie Warland kept being Agatha. David Boloker sent me an unreasonably generous email about my work earlier this year that I have not yet quite responded to with the care it deserves. Dear friends from my RAAF days forty-odd years ago still chat via Messenger (shoutout to Glenn and Bones).

Three friendships ended deliberately, with published letters explaining why. I will not name them here. The letters exist; the boundaries exist; the silence exists. Some endings are themselves a form of care.

The institutional matter

In late February 2026 I received a Concerns Notice from a firm called Kennedys, acting on behalf of a former treating practitioner, regarding nine alleged imputations in Misdiagnosed, the book I had published in 2025 about the diagnostic catastrophe and the practitioners who failed to recognise it. Nine is, on reflection, a respectable showing for a memoir. Over the following four weeks I assembled, with significant help, a documentary response that drew on roughly 460,000 words of personal journal records spanning 2020 to 2025. The response was assertive, evidence-based, and addressed each of the nine imputations with timestamped material.

As of this morning, no reply from opposing counsel had arrived.

I will not say more about the specifics while the matter is live. I will say that the experience of writing the response, of going back through five years of journal entries written when I did not yet know what was wrong with me, and finding in those entries a precise and sober record of what had actually happened, was one of the most clarifying things I have done. The journals had been keeping the receipts the whole time. I had not realised I was keeping receipts. I had thought I was just trying to survive. It turns out the man writing the journal at three in the morning in 2021 was, without telling me, also acting as my legal team.

The journal entries were also, as it turns out, a substantial primary source for the book the practitioner objects to. The book about being misdiagnosed was written from the records of being misdiagnosed. There is a structural irony there that I will leave undeveloped for legal reasons.

What I have learned

I am wary of anniversary essays that conclude with bullet-pointed lessons, because the lessons are usually performances of having-arrived rather than evidence of having-learned. I will avoid the bullet points but I will name four things, briefly, before the fog lifts.

One. The system was the problem and I was not. I knew this in theory before I left Australia, but only just before I left. I now know it in the body. Knowing-in-the-body is the only knowing that survives bad weather.

Two. A friend who knows the file and is willing to ask the obvious question is worth more than every specialist appointment I attended in the four decades preceding the question. Gaye did in twenty minutes on a video call what Australian psychiatry did not manage in forty years of paid attempts. I do not say that to indict the specialists, although there is some indictment available if you want it. I say it because I want to be clear, in print, that the diagnostic insight did not come from credentials or institutions or specialists or environments. It came from a trained and qualified and incredibly humane and smart friend.

Three. Writing more, when you are tired, sometimes works. Not always. But it has worked this year, in ways that surprise me, because the writing was the place where the rebuild was most visible to me. When I could not see whether the move had been the right call, I could read the chapter I had written that morning and the chapter would tell me. The chapters do not lie. They are too specific to lie.

Four. Repair is real. Not redemption, not transformation, not the shiny inspirational version of those things. Repair—the slow, awkward, unfinished, embarrassed-by-itself, ongoing kind. The kind that requires both parties to keep showing up after they have already wanted to leave. I have done some of this with Hương. I have done some of this with myself. I have not done all of it. I expect to be doing it for the rest of my life.

I am, as I write this, the happiest and most contented I have been in my life. That sentence is harder to write than any other sentence in this essay, because the genre wants me to earn it with metaphors and I am not going to. I am sixty-seven years old and I am, for the first time, comfortable in the life I am living. That is the entire claim.

That is what twelve months looks like, when the rebuild is real and the numbers are small enough to count on one hand.

I do not know what the next twelve will look like. Death of a Gentleman launches at the end of this month. The menopause book launches in July. There is a defamation matter that may or may not become a case. There is a relationship that needs daily tending. There are books I have not yet written that I can already feel the shape of, including revisiting my first ever book, written in 1999, and seeing what I got right even back then, and what I got impressively wrong. There is a disability pension that, for the first time in a decade, stretches far enough.

There is fog, most mornings, until about eight-thirty.

The fog is not the story.

The fog is the medium through which the day arrives.

If you have read this far and any of it landed, the most useful thing you can do is forward it to one person you think it might land for. That is the entire ask. The library is at quiethalf.com if you want to see the rest of the shelf.

Written in Đà Lạt on the morning of Saturday 2nd May 2026, the twelve-month anniversary of my arrival.