Autism: Chris Packham reveals inner world of autistic minds

Chris Packham talks about living with autism

Wildlife TV presenter Chris Packham, spent 30 years on the TV “trying to act normal”. Then he decided to bare all in an extremely candid documentary, Asperger’s and Me, revealing what it is really like living with autism.

Since sharing his diagnosis, he has been inundated with letters and emails from autistic people saying they felt misunderstood.

Giving autistic people a voice

His decision to give them a voice was because: “I don’t want anyone else to have to go through some of the difficulties that I faced myself.”

So he collaborated with film-makers, animators and musicians to make a series of short films showing what really goes on in the minds of four people with autism – Flo, Murray, Anton and Ethan.

Inside Our Autistic Minds

The deeply moving documentary Inside Our Autistic Minds shows these films being made and the impact they had on families and friends of autistic people.

The National Autistic Society describes autism as a ‘lifelong developmental disability which affects how people communicate and interact with the world’. More than one in 100 people are on the autism spectrum.

Chris Packham was diagnosed with autism in his 40s

There has been a rise in the number of adults being diagnosed with autism and it wasn’t until he was in his 40s that Chris Packham was diagnosed with Asperger’s. 

Getting a formal diagnosis does help people make sense of their lives, but it doesn’t really make much of a difference to their daily existence, due to pressures by society to conform.

Before his autism diagnosis Chris did his best to fit in 

Up till his diagnosis, Chris did his best to fit in, trying to say the ‘right’ things and not offend anyone.

During his school years, the world was a very dark place where he was subjected to taunts and insults from his peers, leaving him bewildered as to why he was being picked on and excluded. However while his teenage years were often miserable, they were also the time when he was happiest in his life.

In the documentary Asperger’s and Me, Chris, who hosted BBC Springwatch, reveals how he reared a kestrel from a chick and formed a strong bond with the bird.

He trained it to fly to him and says when he was flying his kestrel, it was the happiest he had ever been in his life. The kestrel only lived for six months and he said: “I have never loved anything as intensely. It was perfect every day for six months until the end. I only connected with what is buried in the ground and when that didn’t exist it was catastrophic.”

‘When I got into things, I really got into them’

When talking about the bird, he looks visibly pained and reveals that for years he would still go back every year to visit the kestrel’s grave in the field where he used to fly. “As a child, when I got into things, I really got into them.”

In his teenage years, growing up in Southampton, he credits punk music with saving him, saying: “It sounded how I felt.”

When asked on camera if he had ever attempted suicide, he admits to thinking about it “very seriously” about “three times in my life”. It was his relationship with his dogs, Itchy and Scratchy that stopped him as “they loved me and I couldn’t let them down”.

‘Human relationships due to their complexity can make you unhappy’

For Chris, relationships with animals are more straightforward and simpler and he says: “Human relationships because of their complexity can make you unhappy”.

Chris does have a long-term partner who he has been with for over a decade but they don’t live together. Charlotte Corney, owner of Isle of Wight Zoo, describes him as sometimes “like an alien” and admits it is “hard to deal with his lack of empathy”.

However she accepts him as he is, saying: “He is fascinating. There is a lifetime guarantee with Chris that I will never be bored.”
He feels “very lucky to have found someone who puts up with my social failings”.

He is keen to show the positive side of being autistic

Chris is keen to show the positive side of being autistic and in the documentary he meets Steve Silberman who has written extensively about the contribution autistic people have made to the tech industry such as Google, Apple and Microsoft.

“Before the tech industry, they would have been considered weird people but now they are running the world,” he says.

This desire to change autistic people and ‘normalise’ them is because “it is easier to change the individual rather than society,” says Steve Silberman.

Sensory overload

Chris feels he has benefited from being autistic, experiencing the world in a very different way, with heightened senses that at times are overwhelming, and a mind that is constantly bouncing from one subject to the next. When he walks in the woods, he hears “layers of bird songs” and he is very conscious of sights and smells.

He believes being “able to see things and hear things that most people can’t is a gift”.

After school Chris went to university to study zoology. “When I left university, I was virtually unemployable but my sister said why don’t you go on TV and talk about animals. I had something my peers didn’t. I had a vast encyclopaedic knowledge of the natural world.”

It was then he started his career as a presenter with spikey blonde hair, on The Really Wild Show. “I realise now there is no way I could do these shows without autism.”

It seems Chris has now come to terms with being who he is. He realises social situations are not for him and hasn’t been to a party for over a decade saying: “I suspect people find me a little bit weird which is why I choose to live in a wood”.

‘We need to understand autistic people better, not change the way they are’

He hopes these TV documentaries will increase people’s understanding of those with autism saying “we need to understand autistic people better, not change the way they are”.

To find out more about characteristics of autism click here

To watch Inside our Autistic Minds click here