The writer, teacher and naturalist Joe Harkness, who has died aged 39, was an inspiring advocate for the role that wild nature can play in alleviating depression and helping all minds, but especially neurodivergent ones, find joy and peace.
His first book, Bird Therapy (2018), was a notable success from a new generation of authors who found readers online and crowdfunded their publication via the now defunct Unbound. In Bird Therapy, Harkness told the story of his own breakdown, near-suicide and subsequent recovery through watching birds near his home in rural Norfolk.
Readers responded to his honesty and heartfelt practical advice, as well as the obvious pleasure he found in nature. “In that moment, watching the flock of finches, I was allowing myself to become lost and absorbed in the sights in front of me,” he wrote.
“I started to notice that when I was out, on my own, experiencing nature and birds in a personal and intimate way, I was more relaxed than I’d ever been before. My breathing rate slowed and I closed my mind to repetitive thoughts and worries. My only focus was observing birds and learning about them. I was losing myself in birds, in a positive way.”
Following the success of the book, Harkness continued his day job as a teacher of pupils with significant learning disabilities. In 2025, he published Neurodivergent, By Nature, an original and deeply researched exploration of neurodivergency and the natural world sparked by a belated diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
It was also inspired by a joyful new obsession – moths. Here, as with his interest in birds, he rapidly surpassed the skills of his naturalist friends in identifying obscure micro-moths.
The book featured fascinating interviews with neurodivergent conservationists, and was a plea for embracing neurodivergency to better restore biodiversity. It was shortlisted for the East Anglian Book Awards as well as the 2026 Wainwright prize for conservation writing. Harkness, a devoted father who continued to experience depression, took his own life two weeks before the prize ceremony.
Born in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, from the age of four Harkness was raised by his single working mum, who worked as an administrator. Harkness credited his maternal grandad’s quiet passion for the natural world with his later rediscovery of it.
He enjoyed a close relationship with his mother who, in an interview after the success of Bird Therapy, described Harkness as a young boy as “very talkative, very bright, very intelligent, very inquisitive, had boundless energy, a keen eye for detail, loved nature, and was very good at reading, especially the Argos catalogue”.
Harkness later called himself “a proper nightmare” at school but also reflected upon the obviousness of his ADHD behaviours and the failure of school and health professionals in the early 2000s to offer him a diagnosis.
“I just flew under the radar, like so many other children in my generation,” he wrote in Neurodivergent, by Nature. “Instead, in the eyes of society, and my teachers, I was the archetypal product of a single mother in social housing, and of course I was going to act up to that.”
During his teenage years, he self-medicated with various drugs, which he later said contributed to his chronic anxiety. He dropped out of sixth form and did not pursue further education. In his 20s, Harkness drank heavily and took drugs, but also managed to build a career, working as a development worker for the Prince’s Trust and a support worker at the charity Mencap.
In 2013, he was stopped from a suicide attempt, had a breakdown and took three weeks off work. During a country walk with Emma, his future wife, he saw a pair of common buzzards displaying over a tree-line. The buzzards were a gateway into a new passion: birdwatching. Permanently quitting all drink and illegal drugs, Harkness found new naturalist friends, who were astonished by how quickly he became a proficient birder, rapidly able to identify birds by flight, call and song.
He began teaching teenagers excluded from mainstream education and also attracted a growing following on his Bird Therapy blog and on Twitter, where he shared his thoughts on his recovery through nature. When a follower suggested he could publish the blog as a book via Unbound, he approached the publisher, who wanted him to raise £18,500 to bring it out. “It really scared me,” he later said.
The sum was raised in just five weeks. Bill Bailey donated £1,000 and Chris Packham wrote a glowing foreword, predicting that the book would save lives, and it was endorsed by Stephen Fry and the novelist Melissa Harrison, who called Harkness’s writing “inclusive, unpretentious and evangelical in the best way”.
Bird Therapy’s success in the UK led it to be translated into five languages. Harkness was told by readers that they owed their life to him. However, his entry into what he called the “guild” of nature writers was disillusioning. He found his fellow writers competitive and self-obsessed. Social media contributed to growing anxiety. “The more open I was on social media, the less people engaged with me. If you’re already struggling with self-esteem, it is hell to be on it,” he said in 2020. He closed his accounts.
He was more comfortable devoting time to his family, alongside his responsibilities as a special needs teacher at Cromer academy, a Norfolk state school, and latterly as a senior teacher at Parkside, Norwich, where he worked with pupils with autism, ADHD, Down’s syndrome and learning disabilities. In 2023 he wrote Inside/Outside, a teachers’ nature-themed resource book for promoting emotional literacy.
His pupils, like his readers, found Harkness to be warm, inclusive, enthusiastic, empathic and a lover of bad jokes. He said he made a point of talking about mental health with his students every day.
One day at work, a mental health nurse asked Harkness if he had ever considered that he may have ADHD. It took more than three years to obtain a formal diagnosis, in 2022, and when it came it was a relief. “The whole idea completes me,” he wrote. It also enabled him to access helpful drug treatment, and set him on a path to write Neurodivergent, by Nature.
Before his death, Harkness had just finished an extensively revised edition of Bird Therapy, which is due to be published by Bloomsbury next year.
He is survived by Emma and their two daughters.
Joe Harkness, writer and teacher, born 23 December 1986; died 4 September 2026
