Community mental health, seen from the other side.

From August 2026 through May 2027 I'll be a Fulbright Visiting Student Researcher at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Social Work. That is the official version. The real one starts months earlier, in the middle of taking a life apart: I have never set foot outside Europe, and now I'm selling the cars, clearing the cupboards, and moving my wife and son to the other side of the world, into a mental health system I know only from the outside and mean to understand from the inside. Equal parts adventure and quiet panic.

For the year my job is to watch how this country looks after its own: what it builds, what it improvises, what it gets right, and what quietly falls apart in practice, the way it does everywhere. I am not here to declare a winner between the American way and the European one. I am here because seeing my own work through a completely foreign system is the fastest way I know to understand what I could never see from home.

Alongside the research there is the ordinary, unignorable business of a year abroad: finding a life, making friends, missing home, getting things wrong, and slowly building a map of the people doing this work here, the researchers, the clinicians, the ones holding programmes together with not enough money and too much heart. Some of it will go well. Some of it will not. I will write about both.

I don't yet know what the year will teach me, or what it will cost, or what I'll carry home. That is exactly why I'm keeping a record of it, in the letters.