Every employee brings their life to work: the struggling kid, the sick parent, the divorce. Employers already pay for that weight in lost attention, slower judgment and quiet resignations. Chris Coulter ran a 70-person company, then lived his own hardest years in silence. He explains the Emotional Load Economy and why every workplace is either adding weight to its people or taking some off.

In January 2017, twenty-one months after my daughter Maddie died at fourteen, I wrote about the photos on my fridge. Everyone else's get swapped out at the end of the school year. Hers does not. Nine years on, I'm putting the piece back up unchanged, with one correction: I was wrong about what her brothers were carrying, and wrong about why.

If you know Maddie Coulter because of how she died, you know the least important thing about her. She vetted my dating profiles. She ran a One Direction fan club and had 1,500 followers in a week. She was funny and loud and right more often than I was comfortable with. This is about what happens to a person's biography after they die, and a request from her father to remember the life instead.

Eleven years after losing his 14-year-old daughter Maddie, Chris Coulter is confronting another painful part of grief: memories fading. From shoes at the front door to Adele in the shower, he shares the ordinary moments he refuses to let disappear and why Maddie’s life deserves to be remembered for far more than the way it ended.

Seven signs your teenager might be struggling, read back by the man who wrote them. The adult version of that list runs to fourteen items and the first seven are the same seven. Chris Coulter on cycling that quietly stopped, four hours of sleep for years, the explanation waiting for any man in his fifties who goes quiet, and why recognizing something and admitting it applies to you are two different things.

When my daughter died, her brothers were 13 and 9. Their hockey teams made black armbands with both boys' numbers on them. There was no school in that neighbourhood where they walked in as two kids nobody had heard about. This is about surviving siblings, what a grieving parent misses while they're inside their own grief, and the one thing to say to a family that has other children at home.

In the spring of 2018, three years after we lost Maddie, I picked a day and told nobody. Not my therapist, not my closest friends, not the people who had already carried me through the worst thing that can happen to a family. Nothing was missing from my life. I had every person I needed. What I didn't have was any willingness to be a burden to them, and that was the dangerous part.

A school cancelled a talk I was giving to parents about my daughter. The post about it reached a couple of hundred thousand people and two hundred of them told me the school was wrong. Four families had registered. I spent years angry at a coordinator because it was easier than being curious about everyone who stayed home, and what kept them home was never indifference.

In October 2012 I published my first post about depression. I'd been seeing a psychiatrist for four years and took a careful inventory of my own life every few weeks. My daughter Maddie was twelve. She appears in that post once, as evidence I was doing fine. Knowing about depression and seeing it in the person across the table are two different abilities, and I confused them.

When Chris Coulter lost his daughter Maddie in 2015, he spent the next nine years trying to get back to the man he was before. Nobody warned him about the second loss, the one that happens underneath. This is a piece about losing yourself after losing a child, about the two selves that argue in private, and about what finally stopped the arguing after eleven years.

Committed is a word for choices. You commit a crime. You commit to a mortgage. Suicide is not one of those, and the word makes a claim about what happened that is simply wrong. Chris Coulter on the phrase people still use, the fence it builds around other families, what to say to a grieving parent instead, and why correcting somebody only works when it hands them information rather than a test they can fail.

I run a mental health company, and some days I think we talk about mental health too much. Not for the reason you'd expect. The phrase itself has gone abstract. "We all have mental health" is as useful as "we're all animals," true and inert. This is about why awareness stopped working, why vague conversation feels like too much conversation, and what changes when you get specific.

Someone who mattered to me said I built my audience on the back of my daughter's death. I remember it word for word. Instead of firing back, I took the accusation apart honestly. Yes, Maddie's story reaches people, and I've watched it happen. What the accusation misses is the story I refuse to tell and the families I've never charged. This is about the line between advocacy and exploitation, and who gets to decide where it sits.

Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace reports engagement at a record low, with managers declining fastest. Most wellbeing vendors respond with another engagement initiative. Chris Coulter argues the real driver sits outside the survey's reach: the struggling teen, the aging parent, the divorce, the debt, the unspoken grief your people carry to work and never mention. Here is what employers miss, why managers are breaking, and what asking actually looks like.

After losing his daughter, Chris Coulter watched his psychological profile become obsolete overnight. The decisive, driven results were gone. He blamed adult ADHD, his medication, early dementia, even mould in his coffee, before his doctor named the real cause. This post covers what grief does to memory, concentration and motivation, and why forgetting a passcode does not mean you are losing your mind.

There is a parent in your office right now who was out at 3am looking for their kid. She smiles at the elevator. She hits her targets. Nobody knows what she is carrying. This is for that parent, and for the ones who love her but cannot help her because they don't know. A piece about the invisible weight of raising a struggling teen while showing up for a job, a team, and the rest of a family. Written from lived experience.

The hardest part of losing a child is not the funeral. It is learning to live with the guilt, unanswered questions, and fear that your child will be forgotten. Chris Coulter shares what grief looks like ten years after losing his daughter Maddie and offers practical ways to support bereaved parents with compassion, presence, and remembrance.

Chris Coulter lost his daughter Maddie in 2015. He is not a therapist or clinician. He is a father who survived the worst thing a parent can face and decided that could not be the whole story. This piece explores why lived experience is a legitimate credential and why it reaches people clinical training sometimes cannot.

When someone you love dies, ordinary objects become something else entirely. A hoodie. A playlist. A card in a drawer. This piece explores what grief does to the things they left behind, why holding on is not the same as being stuck, and how you will know when the time is right to let go.

Eleven years after losing his daughter Maddie, Chris Coulter writes honestly about what traumatic grief does to the brain, why the pain does not diminish with time, and what people carrying loss actually need from the people around them. For parents navigating grief, loss, or the weight of a struggling child.