In the nicest possible way, you should be de*d

This post contains a strong content warning.

Chris Packham's documentary Inside Our Autistic Minds

Last week, a well-credentialed allied health professional diagnosed me with being on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She also confirmed, "Yes, in the nicest possible way, you should be dead."

I've been thinking for a number of years that I should be dead, so I found it both comforting, and hugely traumatising (I slept for days afterwards), that I finally found someone who agrees with me. It's just not likely - physically, mentally, or statistically - for me to still be here after everything that has happened to me, and is still happening to me.

Apparently I am so stressed from long-term and ongoing adverse life events, that it is coming out of my eyes. I have 20/20 vision and my eye health is excellent, but I am struggling to see. The therapist even commented that there is a problem behind my right eye in particular, which she says is the 'male' side - does she mean to say that my unresolved gender dysphoria is literally bursting out of my eyes?

I wrote the following post in June 2025 but didn't publish it. Now seems the right time.

Gen Memory

March 2026

I’ve just watched a British documentary about zoologist Chris Packham, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome in his forties.

We aren’t clones in terms of our aspy-ness, but for the first time in my life, I’ve just seen someone a bit like me generously revealing themselves to the world on a screen.

He hangs all his clothes facing in the same direction, with a little space between each hanger.

He buys multiples of the same shirt, if he really likes it. 

He wears the same clothes, and eats the same food, because he finds it comforting.

He hates clutter and noise, and was bullied at school for being different.

He rejects authority, if he can’t see sense in following the rules.

He hates going to parties because they are social minefields, and sensorially draining.

He has an affinity with animals and is completely devastated if a cherished pet dies.

His devotion to his pets has prevented him from acting on suicidal urges.

His senses are all heightened, and his brain flits rapidly, unbidden, from one thought to the next.

He has learnt how to act in socially normalised ways, and uses stimming to self-regulate.

Same.

Then there are facets of his personality that differ to my own.

Chris craves solitude and lives alone by choice, whereas I crave the company of others and live alone by force of circumstance.

Chris keeps the blinds down in his home to control his crucial bubble of safety, whereas I lift them up to willingly connect me to the world outside, especially the natural world.

Chris admits to having an empathy deficit, whereas I am empathetic to the point of inadvertent self-destruction.

I’ve been told by my [former] psychiatrist that I can’t be validly assessed for autism spectrum disorder while I still carry a severe burden of anxiety and trauma, which I do.  Yesterday I was diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression, and I also have complex-PTSD, gender dysphoria, and giftedness.  There’s a lot going on in my brain. 

However, I don’t need to be formally assessed by a neuropsychologist to know that I definitely have traits of autism, just like every other gifted person I know.  As far as I’m concerned, it comes with the territory of being neuroatypical. 

I worked it out a few years ago, after the label ‘autistic’ had been weaponised against me as a taunt and put down by an important person in my life.  In my journey to understand this amorphous neuroatypical person, I slowly started to understand myself, my family, my friends, and the many neuroatypical people in my broader community. 

The challenge for me – which quite frankly, I’ve been running scared from – was to learn to not just accept my aspy traits, but to love them.  Due to decades of trauma, ridicule, and victimisation, it was a very hard ask.  But Chris Packham’s documentary has helped me see that I should not be ashamed of being my honest self.  I realise this is why he made the documentary – to try to ease the suffering of people like me, who live in a world that does not understand or include us.

Chris says he would not be the zoologist he is, if he were not autistic.  I can see now that I would not be the writer, artist, curator, composer, choral conductor, musician, teacher, volunteer, parent, or friend that I am, without my autistic traits. 

But I can’t help feeling that I am the statistic, because, according to the documentary, intelligent autistic female-borns are eight times more likely to take their own lives than the rest of the population.

Gen Memory

June 2025