When I was eight, I fell through the ice while skating on a duck pond in Richmond. I was submerged in icy water for nearly fifteen minutes before being rescued by firefighters.

I was blue by the time they fished me out, and I wasn’t breathing.

The paramedics rushed me to hospital, but, after forty minutes of CPR, my parents were told it was hopeless.

Doctors told them to say goodbye to me, and they were actually discussing transplant donation when I woke up.

Let me tell you, I played the guilt card for years afterwards: ‘Clean my room? But you wanted to give away my kidneys!’

[Laughter]

The thing is, when my mother told me what’d happened, that I’d been clinically dead for over an hour, I laughed.

I wasn’t afraid of death. I wasn’t afraid of anything. The signs were there, if anyone had bothered to look.

Tell me, have any of you ever tried those immersive sink-or-swim language courses? Let’s see a show of hands—

Almost half of you. Well, aren’t we a roomful of overachievers?

[Laughter]

For those who haven’t had the pleasure, you’re basically dropped into a situation where you don’t speak a word of the language you want to learn, usually with a host family.

No one explains anything to you, and if they do, you can’t understand them.

It’s not so much immersion as submersion. And these courses work because there’s no way out. Even when you’re tired, even when you’re hungry and fed-up and frustrated, you can’t break the fourth wall and appeal for help.

Your only option is to use the language you’re learning to survive. Well, that’s what it’s like for a person like me to exist in a social world.

Thanks in no small part to Hollywood, the word psychopath is so loaded with meaning, it’s hard to see past the stigma of the label to the human being beneath.

But I’m biologically wired not to feel shame or guilt. I was born without the ability to empathise, just as some people are born without limbs. It’s not our fault.

To paraphrase the immortal Jessica Rabbit: I’m not a bad person: I’m simply drawn that way.

[Laughter]

If you have no inherent sense of right or wrong, being told something is ‘bad’ means nothing to you. Sociopathic kids need extra help with these kind of concepts, but most parents haven’t got a clue where to begin.

Remember that statistic I gave you at the start of this talk? Psychopathy is as common as autism and bipolar disorder, but there are no support groups for the parents of budding sociopaths. Try typing ‘I think my child is a psychopath’ into a search engine and see how far you get.

You won’t find online forums. No message boards filled with helpful advice.