Writing

MAD in THE UK 

PUBLISHED JULY 2026

HOW WILL WE LISTEN? Thoughts from an Australian therapist.

Eva is 13. Simon runs a food business. Neither is asking for a medical or psychological label. Both are trying to understand what is happening in them. A label names a category. A feeling phrase locates you inside the live emotional experience. It is a difference most of us have never been taught to listen for.

Eva has just started secondary school. There are assignments. Lots of them. And she has the experience of knowing she needs to start a task but finding herself completely unable to begin. Hungry to understand, she went looking for help.

As a regular listener to ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind — one of Australia’s flagship psychology programs — she first searched its archives, found nothing relevant to her struggle, and so she wrote to the program directly. The producers, delighted to hear from a thoughtful teenager with an issue all too familiar to many adults, built an entire episode around her concern.

When the host asked why she couldn’t begin, Eva said this:

“It’s either like a sense of overwhelm because I’m thinking about all the tasks I haven’t done, how everyone else is way ahead of me and all that sort of stuff. Or it’s like a sense of doom — if I do this and I hand it up and I get a bad grade for it, then that’s going to be hard on my mental health. And then if I do it, then that means the task is real. And then it’s just like, oh no. So then my brain kind of shuts down and it’s like, just don’t, don’t do anything.”

Eva is telling it like it is for her. Clearly, and with a level of detail available to those who can tune into their emotional world. She experiences two distinct states. One she calls overwhelm. One she calls doom. They are different from each other — different in feeling, different in what they show her about the task ahead.

She moves between them. Up and down. Up and down. Until her brain, as she puts it, simply shuts down.

Eva’s words are not unusual. They are readily recognisable. Most of us know something of what she is describing. The spiral she is caught in — between overthinking and comparing herself to others, versus retreating from the risk of not succeeding — is something many people will know.

She is using feeling phrases — everyday words, cobbled together, describing what she hears inside her emotional experience. And what she hears is not a condition. It is movement — two states of mind, and the spiral between them.

She isn’t asking us to name what condition she has, what label her experience sits under. She is trying to understand what is happening in her.

The psychologist interviewed alongside Eva offered a label: task paralysis. She described it as closer to a freeze response than a laziness or a choice — involuntary, uncomfortable, not something Eva is doing to herself. This reframe is reassuring. It removes blame.

But it also does two things. It takes Eva’s words and returns them to her in the language of psychological theory — everyday language replaced with technical language, moving her from inside her emotional experience to inside a category. And something of what she actually said gets left out: the movement, the spiral up and down between two distinct states she can feel and track in real time. A static label, however well intentioned, cannot contain something moving.

Labels can bring relief. We all want that sometimes — a name for what we are experiencing, the discovery that others have felt it too, that we are not simply failing or imagining things. But Eva went to a lot of effort to ask for help understanding her experience. She is reaching toward something a label cannot quite provide.

Eva is not alone in this. Simon also comes to us via All in the Mind. He too turns inside and describes honestly what he finds there. He shows us the same thing Eva does — two states of mind where emotion is in charge. But he shows us something more: what it looks like to find a third state, one in which he has greater influence over his emotions.

Simon runs a small food business in regional Victoria. Delivering is central to his work, and he is in the van most days. He describes himself as a calm person — mild-mannered, even-keeled, conflict-avoidant. For the most part, this is true.

Until he drives into Melbourne.

Simon was interviewed for a program on road rage. Not as a victim of it. As someone who experiences it himself — and is troubled by what he finds when he does.

In the van, on the city roads, something happens to Simon that he cannot quite account for. He finds himself taking everything personally. A car that cuts him off feels like a deliberate insult. A car parked in a loading zone — something he needs as a delivery driver — sends him somewhere he doesn’t recognise in himself.

“My reaction to road rage just is not reasonable. I find myself taking everything incredibly personally.”

“Clearly they mean to insult me personally, which makes no sense. But it’s just what seems to go through your mind.”

“My mind just boils for some reason. And I don’t know why. It’s regularly caused me to be far more verbally aggressive than I ever would be normally.”

And then the incident passes. Simon comes back to himself. And here is what he finds.

“After those interactions happen, I feel deeply affected by it. Knowing that I’m clearly the one in the wrong here, I get shaky and embarrassed, but also just like my mind wasn’t me for a time.”

My mind wasn’t me for a time.

This is what a state of mind does. It doesn’t just change how we feel. It changes how we see. It reorganises our entire relationship with the world around us — other people, events, intentions, meaning — until we move into a different state and the previous one becomes almost incomprehensible.

Simon knows the calm, conflict-avoidant person he usually is. He knows the boiling, verbally aggressive person in the van. They don’t feel like the same person to him. They are two different states of mind. Each with its own feeling phrases. Each with its own version of Simon.

But Simon does something Eva hasn’t yet found a way to do. Before driving into Melbourne, he has been trying something.

“I’ve been trying to actively tell myself that most people on the road are not trying to be assholes. That is often proved wrong. But I even try and tell myself that even if they’re proving me wrong, they’re probably just having as bad a day as I’m about to have. It seems to help. I literally have it written on my steering wheel.”

He is not pretending the other states won’t arrive. He knows they will. But he is building himself something to hold onto when they do. A handhold. A feeling phrase of his own choosing, written where he can see it.

And in doing so he finds a steadier state of mind — one in which he has more influence over his emotions. Not control. Not the elimination of difficult feelings. Something more honest, and more achievable, than either.

This is what staying with everyday language, and following it carefully, can open up. Not a diagnosis. Not a treatment plan. An understanding of the states of mind we move between, the spiral that carries us up and down between them, and the possibility of finding somewhere steadier to stand.

Eva and Simon are not unusual. They are simply people who turned inside, described honestly what they found, and followed their own experience carefully.

Listen to what they actually said.

Eva: “It’s just like, oh no.” “Just don’t, don’t do anything.” “My brain kind of shuts down.”

Simon: “My mind just boils for some reason.” “I don’t know why.” “My mind wasn’t me for a time.”

None of these are grammatically tidy. They trail off. They repeat. They reach for something and find only approximations. But they carry what a single word cannot — the topography of the space the person is in. The felt reality of being inside a state of mind, rather than observing it from outside.

Static psychological labels have long had a place at the table where conversations about mental health are generated. Eva’s and Simon’s contributions ask whether there is room at that table for everyday feeling language — fragmented, unfinished, honest — alongside the concept of states of mind, the spiral movement between them, and the possibility, that Simon shows us, of finding a steadier place to stand.

They have turned inside and told us honestly what they found. Will we value and make space for the contributions they have generously brought to a vitally important conversation?