Meet 
Daniel

Daniel Neal is a poet and the author of The UMS & AHS series, Understanding Mental Struggles & Addressing Helpful Solutions.

 

Born in Scotland and raised in Australia, Daniel has lived a turbulent life between two hemispheres. From an early age, he wrote stories of adventures with his imaginary friend, an early sign of a creative spirit that would never quite leave him. 

 

Daniel had always wished he could draw. He would visually hallucinate colours and shapes on paper, but the ability to translate them into art eluded him. So instead, he wrote descriptions of the characters he envisioned, worlds and creatures that overtook his imagination. 

 

As he grew older, however, the performance-driven nature of schooling steered him elsewhere. Studying maths and physics took the limelight, leaving little room for the stories he loved.

 

Daniel showed signs of mental illness early in his teenage years. Following the breakdown of his parents' marriage, he became a deeply introspective young man, low in confidence but with a quiet and sincere passion for helping the people around him. He grew up in a family where mental health was recognised but never spoken about, a pattern that foreshadowed his life right up until his first admission to a psychiatric facility at the age of twenty-one.

 

His diagnosis of Schizophrenia and complex PTSD revealed something that would come to define his purpose: the people around him lacked the ability to freely talk about things that were mentally "messy." From that realisation grew a fierce desire to break the stigma. A diagnosis that might have caused others to shrink became a badge Daniel wore proudly, wherever he travelled.

 

It was a psychotic episode that finally drew him away from the world of numbers and back to writing. An episode had left him convinced he was a prodigy solving previously unsolved branches of mathematics, the kind of grandiose delusions that are a common feature of Schizophrenia.

 

Daniel turned to words to heal, to teach, and to advocate for others carrying the emotional weight of psychiatric illness. It wasn't until his most recent hospital admission, during an acute episode of psychosis and depression, that Daniel began writing poetry as well.

 

It was through this process that the UMS & AHS series was born. Daniel imagined a future version of himself as a father, wondering how he would explain his mental illness to his child in a way that was honest, educational, and digestible. That vision became a blueprint and then a book series.

 

This is the first book in that series: The UMS & AHS for Sadness. It is an educational tool designed to help parents and educators open a conversation about mental health with the children in their lives, offering a space and time to talk openly about sadness, an emotion we all carry and express.

 

Daniel hopes that one day his series will become the building blocks that adults all over the world reach for when they need to talk to children about mental struggles. He is committed to a future where discussing mental health is as easy and unremarkable as talking about the weather, and he brings to that mission something rare: a life both lived and studied in mental health.