This project began as an informal DNP-Psychiatry student project outlining a personal practice philosophy as well as creating general health recommendations that could be provided to patients and non-patients free of charge. This involved touching on factors that commonly influence the quality of life for individuals, which, well, as soon as that began to be explored, the project ballooned, growing well beyond the initial conception. 

This is a pet project to be released in digital format for free when it gets to a point where it feels ready for publishing. 

It incorporates studies in psychiatry, psychology, sociology, and history, as well as some economics and cultural anthropology. 

It is designed to be wide in scope yet practical and digestible.  

For inquiries and connections:
I can be contacted at my name at this site domain. 

Michael 

April 2026

Soon after I started writing, I decided not to dictate what the book would be about completely, but to just look at the data and go, letting the book write itself in a sense, just seeing what would happen, watching the process unfold and where it would take me.

I paused writing last month for several reasons, one being that I needed to sit back and take stock of where the book was going in light of what I was finding in the literature and exploring in writing. I think a lot of what I had initially planned to write about will be dropped, especially the earlier ideas that weren’t jiving very well with later discoveries. Dropping all that will give the book better clarity and sense of direction.

At work I have shifted into studying neurology and dementia, working with late-life cases. I have wanted to learn more in this field, and so am happy about this, but it will of course take away time from this project. That’s okay. That’s life, and I’m still helping others.

For this project, I need to accumulate more information to build on the slight pivot that has been taken in the exploration. So I will focus on reading and building the database more with the new topics, as well as organizing potential topics in light of the clearer picture I’m getting.

February 2026

I’ve written about 32,000 words and nearly completed the first section of the Handbook. However, I’m getting very busy with my “day job,” which is starting to slow the project down. It’s occurred to me that I don’t have to wait until the entire thing is finished to release it, but that I can make digital versions of each section available as I go. If I do that, I can also get more feedback on it, which can be a good or bad thing, depending on how it influences the project. To start, I have some people to whom I would like to show this section draft, get their feedback. This includes a psychologist and old friend who is in military leadership.

January 2026

I’ve completed transferring the core notes. More notes will be added as needed, but now we move into focusing on processing and writing. Time to get groovy.

December 2025

I’ve made a lot of progress recently, and am maybe 85% of the way through transferring my notes. This last part will be a bit of a slog, though, and I don’t expect I’ll finish this year.

October 2025

I tend to treat nonfiction reading as works in progress—I mark up my books and put personal reflections in the margins. This helps me digest the books but is still not enough to learn well. Because I would often forget the material over time and because I wanted to improve my ability to process it all, I began typing up notes as digital documents for easy review. 

That resulted in having condensed forms of the books with notes. It still wasn’t a good system. 

I purchased Scrivener, which I used to pull all of my documents by subject into a file that I could better organize, together with creating new internal documents with cross-comparison reflections, but this still was not a great system. Better, sure, but I felt it could improve. 

Then I learned about Obsidian, a database that allowed me to break the documents down into smaller notes linked forwards and backwards to each other in a web-like system. It’s a very flexible system that allows various forms of tagging along with cross-linking to make it easy to search and experiment with grouping notes in different ways. It also will bring up relevant notes in table form or visual-web form, or both side-by-side, to stimulate different ways of thinking. 

So I have been transferring all of my notes to Obsidian for this project. The amount of notes is massive, and I am maybe about 70% of the way through. I’ll make updates here as seems appropriate. 

Tools: 
Obsidian — notes & information database
Zotero — references & bibliography
Scrivener — composition