About

I’m Peter W. I came to this work by an unusual route.

Independent mental health advocate, author, and the founder of Mental Understanding.

Twenty years of building things

For twenty years I worked as an architectural technician and designer, on commercial projects and for homeowners: loft conversions, extensions, kitchens, new builds. I was formerly an Associate Member of the Chartered Institute of Architectural Technologists.

That career taught me how to take a vague, messy brief and turn it into something ordered and buildable — to know what’s load-bearing and what’s decoration, and to see where things fail first. I didn’t know then that it was training for the most important project of my life.

Raising my son

I’m a single father. I raised my son on my own, and he has high-level ADHD. No textbook fitted the boy in front of me, so I learned by doing.

What worked wasn’t trying to make him think differently. It was giving him order — a system, a pattern to follow, an outside structure he could lean on until he could manage himself from the inside.

Everything I write here comes from that practical experience, backed by the reading, the training and the research that followed.

Why this site exists

So much mental health information is either too clinical to use or too vague to trust. I wanted something in between: real research, explained in plain English, so you can understand your own mind, and the minds of the people around you, a little better.

Most days I take a newly published study on anxiety, depression, ADHD, sleep, loneliness, or the way screens and the news affect us, and write it up in full — what the researchers found, what the findings can’t tell us, and what you might try next. Every piece links back to its source so you can check the evidence yourself.

Training

• Level 2 Certificate in Counselling Skills (2025)
• Mental Health First Aid & Advocacy in the Workplace (2021)
• Safeguarding and Prevent (2024)
• Understanding Specific Learning Difficulties (2021)
• Understanding Behaviour that Challenges (2021)

My books