The weird world of Robin Ince
What, exactly, is the value of a diagnosis? A review of Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity, by Robin Ince.
Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity
Why do we get diagnosed? Most people, for most of history, follow a thought process that goes roughly like this: something is wrong with you, you get a diagnosis from some kind of expert, and then you ‘fix’ the problem. The quality of each step has improved thanks to things like medicine and science, but the basic principle has stayed the same - the diagnosis is the pivot point, the moment of epiphany. We can see the ultimate form of this, the apotheosis of the apothecary, in early 21st century shows like House MD.
In fact that’s never quite been true. If you’ve worked with clinical data like GP records, you’ll know that concrete diagnosis is surprisingly rare. Biology is fuzzy, the boundaries between conditions are not clear-cut, and doctors are risk-based. You feel there’s something wrong you, there are several possibilities, the expert rules out some of them and treats you based on risks and probabilities. Maybe that ‘fixed’ you or maybe - as with many ailments - you got better on your own in a few days. Diagnosis is not a moment but an ongoing process that can take months or years to unfold, if it ever does.
In recent decades a third idea about diagnosis has emerged - diagnosis as a form of positive identity. Not everything is an illness after all. We are all different, both physically and mentally. Our brains are complex and respond in different ways to the same stimuli. People may be struggling not because there’s anything wrong with them, but because society is built around an ideal of a ‘normal’ person in ways that are difficult for those who diverge from that standard to deal with. This idea should not a stretch for, say, tall people on public transport or women literally anywhere.
There is obvious tension between these ideas. Diagnosis as an identity skews closer to the traditional view - I have some defined condition, it’s a fixed part of what makes me Me, and it explains various difficulties Me may have. That can be empowering, helping the person understand what they need from the world to thrive; but it can also be limiting, putting them in a box with a label that defines their life and all the consequences that follow. At worst, we might pathologize what could just be a different kind of normal, medicating the ‘weird’ into a pliant stupor.
It’s this tension that runs throughout Robin Ince’s new book, Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity.
Robin’s career has followed several distinct (if overlapping) phases, each marked by the further evolution of his facial hair. There were the mainstream comedy years, clean-shaven, supporting Ricky Gervais on arena tours, a sharp-edged world that seems to have sat uneasily with him. Then came the segue into science comedy, forging a long-lived partnership with Brian Cox (not that one) in a genre that exploded in the wake of New Atheism, Bad Science and the rise of the Skeptic movement in the UK. The beard appeared: tentatively at first, but it came.
His latest incarnation is perhaps the most pure, the most personal, and one made possible (as Ince readily admits) by his relatively privileged position. He tours the country as a kind of science raconteur, visiting hundreds of independent book shops and delighting audiences with events that aren’t quite comedy gigs but mix knowledge, culture, poetry and a love of literature in one eclectic package. Alongside this, he is the figurehead for Cosmic Shambles, a sort of amateur creative collective who produce independent science documentaries, blogs and short videos for a small but dedicated audience of Patreons. The beard is wild, untamed, living its best life.
It’s easy for critics to sneer at this turn. I’ll be honest: the poetry isn’t to my taste, and the political earnestness can feel a little Mole-ish at times (“For every train delayed / dividends will still be paid…”). Robin’s concerns about climate change and support for Just Stop Oil sit uneasily with his producer/partner’s obsession with motorsport and Shambles’ partnership with a motor racing team. YouTube audiences are small, production values are either charming or dated, and it is not always clear what Shambles is for as it veers haphazardly between science, motorsport and book reviews.
But none of that is really the point - this isn’t for me. Ince has created exactly what he wants on his own terms, for his own community, even as he maintains a mainstream presence on the BBC. Not only that, he is helping to keep a fragile ecosystem of book stores alive by bringing audiences to dozens of them every year. Very few of us can say the same.
This recent transformation came alongside another, the subject of his latest book. Lockdown was a time when many of us encountered ourselves, for good or ill - “many people could no longer run away from their own minds” - and Ince was no exception. Coming home from an exhausting 25-hour Shambles gig, an innocuous comment from his wife led to an epic meltdown described (admirably) in excruciating detail.
Ince is unflinching in describing both his own, irrational rage and examining the anguish and suicidal feelings that followed, as well as the impact on his family. “I feel that sickness in my stomach from when my father was angry with me, and I fear my son is experiencing that too.” As someone who grew up with similar experiences, this resonated deeply.
Some months later, a chance DM exchange with ‘autistic duo’ Jamie + Lion led to a longer Zoom call in which Robin reached his own epiphany. “The great fear of seeking a diagnosis is perhaps that you will discover that there is nothing there and that you are just shit,” but Robin finds, with Jamie’s help, that he is not shit. He has ADHD, and this is a revelation:
There is no moment in my life that has been so utterly and positively transformative. The chaos of my live shows was a positive thing, not negative; it was why people returned. For twenty years of touring, I had walked off stage after almost every show with a sense of failure. […] I realized that the very thing that I thought destroyed and shamed me was actually just my creative mind at work and something to be celebrated.
This shift in thinking was so profound that Robin admits it, “is something I don’t think I will ever truly understand”, but something that struck me reading his book was how much of it was about permission structures. In a chapter on ‘Work’, he describes how an autistic freelancer sets boundaries with clients, using ‘spoons’ as a metaphor for (roughly) energy:
When he does freelance work, he doesn’t charge for days or hours, he charges for spoons used. […] Five spoons might be something involving a night in a hotel which Jamie finds tricky. Five spoons might also be three days of really fun coding, or one day of dealing with a really horrible system. This understanding of the amount of energy he expends has no relationship to how many hours are spent working on it.
Strip away the ‘spoons’ jargon and this is advice that most good freelancers (and good businesses) will or should follow. Charging based on time is generally poor practice - you should charge people based on what you, as an individual seller, believe your time and inconvenience is worth, as long as people are willing to pay it. Robin is not a big fan of capitalism, but this is what peak capitalist performance looks like.
Of course following this advice is easier said than done, and I think that’s where the idea of a diagnosis becomes so liberating - it gives the recipient a kind of permission slip. Talking to Rory Bremner, who was also diagnosed with ADHD, he realises that the impressionist “had spent most of his life concealing what he was and now he was happy that the concealed person could come out of hiding.” And so Robin finally got permission to be weird.
After my conversation with Jamie, I wondered if I should tell my wife. I feared that she would be annoyed with me or just think I was showing off. When I nervously told her, her face beamed. She was pleased and said, “That would be wonderful, because I’ve always thought you were bipolar.” She still thinks it is best to keep me in the attic, understandably.
Permission from whom, exactly? Robin at this point is still in the same personal and professional relationships with the same people, doing the same sort of stuff. It’s not massively clear why a Zoom call with a stranger should suddenly change much. I’m reminded of a story of a friend of a friend who received an autism diagnosis in middle age. Excitedly they sat their teenager down and tried to explain what it meant, only to find that as far as the kid was concerned it meant and changed basically nothing. From their perspective, why would it?
Perhaps mindful of this, Robin sought a professional opinion. I mentioned three ways of thinking about diagnosis at the top. The story so far is very much the first and the third - diagnosis as epiphany, as identity, as core to the being. That is in tension with the idea of diagnosis as a continuous process, and that tension was in full evidence when Robin sought an ‘official’ medical diagnosis, something that caused enormous anxiety: “I didn’t enjoy the official diagnosis and worried about it for weeks beforehand.”
It’s left a little vague why Ince went this route, beyond the suggestion that it was for other people - “I thought an official badge with paperwork might help them more than me” - and he is disdainful of the whole process. “I was far more comfortable being diagnosed by someone else who lived a neurodivergent existence than being scrutinized by a neurotypical expert in the field. […] Even when I ‘passed’ the official test, beyond some momentary relief, it didn’t mean a great deal to me.”
It’s obvious why the build up to the appointment would be stressful, as Robin points out in the book: what if his new understanding - his permission structure - had been taken away? What’s harder to understand is his Vienna-style ambivalence about the result, which isn’t really explained but feels wrapped up in a kind of resentment at having to ‘prove’ himself. His ambivalence toward formal diagnosis is on display when a fan approaches him in Sydney and asks for his advice on getting diagnosed:
I asked if she was happy. She replied, “Very much so.” So I suggested that, if she was doing more than okay, then she probably shouldn’t bother with a diagnosis. But she should just be aware of how her mind interacts with the world, be alert to why certain problems may arise.
That’s not bad advice, but it touches on a tension that runs through the book - is diagnosis valuable, or not? Later in the book Robin speaks to someone who visited a GP to seek an autism diagnosis:
The GP’s reaction was ‘Why? What’s the point? You know they can’t cure it, don’t you?’ This reaction was deeply unsettling and seems to have come from someone who enjoys the unfortunate status of power without the balance of understanding and humanity.
Having experienced GPs, the level of humanity on offer can vary wildly and I can’t comment on this person’s experience; but it surprised me that Robin didn’t see the connection between the doctor’s response - however clumsy or inhumane - and his own. Both are asking the person to consider the same thing: what are you actually trying to achieve by being diagnosed?
The elephant in the room throughout this book is trauma. Robin’s childhood sounds pretty brutal. His mother suffered a life-changing accident resulting in brain damage when he was not even 3 years old and became - through no fault of her own - prone to rages and violent outbursts, at one point trying to stab his father with a screwdriver. He recounts how he would lie in bed listening to his parents have blazing rows, hoping they would divorce. Boarding school as a teenager went exactly as well as you would expect, with the bookish proto-Robin relentlessly bullied. He quotes the experience of a school-friend, Ed: “They took a happy and confident 13 year old and turned him into a chronically under-confident 18 year old.” Not for the first time in Robin’s book, I can sympathise.
Could this be the origin story for Robin’s brain? The relationship between ADHD and childhood trauma is complicated and unclear, even more so because many of the symptoms of ADHD and PTSD are the same. Indeed, the symptoms of ADHD also overlap with bipolar disorder and narcissistic personality disorder, and these conditions can often coexist. Being diagnosed with one doesn’t rule out the others, and symptoms can rarely be neatly assigned.
While the story of Robin’s diagnosis is presented as clear-cut, the story of his medication is more complicated and fragmentary. At some point afterwards he began taking anti-anxiety medication, which seem to have helped a lot; and took SSRIs, which apparently did not. He has not tried ADHD treatments, valuing the “chaos of my mind for my work.”
I’ve been on a similar journey. In my early 20s I was struggling with my own mental health and visited my GP. Over the course of two or three visits, two things become clear: that mental health services were basically non-existent, and that the ‘diagnosis’ I received depended almost entirely on the story I told. When I emphasised feelings of anxiety, I was prescribed beta-blockers; when I talked about hopelessness and depression, SSRIs. I was left to effectively develop my own treatment plan through trial and error.
Robin writes at length about the poor quality of mental health services, describing the case of a man who “was triaged by a cold non-specialist who was literally just ticking boxes based on questions and not listening to his actual answers.” It’s hard to see how you would trust this kind of culture to lead to accurate diagnosis or effective treatment, and yet a recurring theme of Robin’s book is his visceral dislike of sceptics who question modern diagnostic rates of mental health disorders.
“There seems to be an idea that many people are just casually strolling into doctors’ surgeries in order to get diagnosed with a neurodivergence so they’d got some kind of alibi or excuse for life,” he complains, and I know that bigotry abounds but the arguments from others are much more nuanced than the straw-men he presents, as elegantly described by Helen Lewis a couple of years ago:
This BBC piece (“I don't have ADHD, but three private clinics say I do”) - plus this Atlantic article on the “wild west” of Adderall prescription in the US - suggests there is a real over-diagnosis problem. And perhaps, as Dr Kate Womersley suggests, a simultaneous under-diagnosis problem. Really troubled people are languishing on NHS waiting lists, while people whose ADHD has not prevented them from getting a good job can afford to go private, where the drugs are dispensed pretty much on demand.
This isn’t people accusing others of ‘faking’, it’s concern that the overall system is messy, poorly run, often riddled with bad incentives or conflicts of interest, and that this could lead to poor outcomes or exploitation of vulnerable people with mental health issues. In the same piece, Helen poses a question:
One good question to ask these private providers would be: how many patients do you see who you don’t diagnose with ADHD?
Robin provides an answer of sorts in the book - almost none. “Having spoken to many therapists and psychologists, I have learned that very, very few people who seek a diagnosis do not have some form of neurodivergence.” At various points, Robin criticises therapists and doctors who are clueless, ignorant, inhuman, or going through the motions, to such an extent that the book starts to feel a little alt-med in places. So I’m genuinely a bit surprised that he takes their claims at face value, especially when he goes on to make statements like the following:
I believe that if the world can move forward, then psychological labelling, perhaps even the need for medication, will become less necessary. Some of the medicalized will become normalized. […] The regimentation of a single label or diagnosis does not really account for the complexity of how many things can be.
This I think gets to the heart of the problem I have with Robin’s thinking: either diagnoses are immutable and critical, instruments of epiphany bestowed by experts that give you permission to live your best life; or, well, they’re not, in which case the critics Robin rails against are actually kind of agreeing with him.
If you accept that diagnosis is fuzzy, that it is mediated by overwhelmed public services that are prone to error, and that it does not account for the complexity of how things can be, then you have to accept that it is not the basis for a stable identity. You have to open the possibility that some (perhaps many) diagnoses are wrong or incomplete, that some of those mistakes will be harmful, and that health systems can exploit - or be exploited - by people.
But it’s as if Robin can’t quite bring himself to make that leap, perhaps because doing so might feel like putting his own understanding - his own label - at risk, opening himself to the same fear, anxiety and impostor syndrome that seeking an official diagnosis triggered.
I think perhaps now I might have even less anxiety than the average person, and while I can’t promise to cure you, later in the book I will give it a damn good try.
Approaching the end of the book I was waiting for the promised advice, not least because Robin’s struggles with anxiety reflected my own at times. If I’m honest, I was a little disappointed on this front - Robin spoke to his experts, had his epiphany, but has less to say about what came after, especially for those close to him.
It would have been a much stronger book if it contained more of the voices of the people around him - his wife, his colleagues, his professional partner of over a decade, Brian Cox. Without that balance, his depictions of them are often two-dimensional and unflattering, ‘normie’ foils for his self-deprecation. But more than that, it’s unclear how his diagnosis helped them in any way. Ultimately this is a book about Robin’s relationship with the world, but we don’t hear the world’s side.
I’m left wondering at times - what really changed in Robin’s relationship with the world? The version of himself being pitched in this book - the wise, serene guru at peace with himself - sits uneasily with his combative online persona. He talks of slamming the phone down on a BBC producer colleague after an argument and attributes this to his new found sense of confidence post-diagnosis, but it seems an odd anecdote to include if your message is ‘I’m fine now.’
“I find the world of England ruder and ruder, surlier and surlier," he posted recently on BlueSky, in typical misanthropic style. The deep moral decay of society is a recurring theme: “The rules of society seem to dictate that we should prefer the glum, the cynical and the dismissive rather than accepting and welcoming those who are highly charged with their passions,” Ince writes in the book. “To be an enthusiast is to be frowned upon and regarded as, well, weird.”
None of this rings true to me - 2025 is the greatest period in history to be an enthusiast, a time when historians can fill the Albert Hall with classical concerts, comedian peers like Al Murray can launch hit podcasts on war history, Francis Bourgeois can parlay the raw excitement of trainspotting into a media career, and Robin can tour the independent book shops of Britain meeting more of his people in every town. “I wear a badge which reads, ‘Weirdo’,” he declares early in the book; but we are living in the golden age of weirdos.
“Is there a me?” Robin asks at one point during therapy. “I started to worry that there was no real personality or innate self, and that all that existed were my interactions with other people.” The ‘other people’ that Robin Ince describes are often unfamiliar to me. They populate a cruel, conspiratorial world of hypocrites and bullies posing constant threats and challenges which he positions himself in moral opposition to, a stance which heavily defines his online persona. It’s not a world I recognise, and it seems like an exhausting place to live.
That, for Robin, may be the ultimate value of his diagnosis. Neurodiversity, “challenges the presumption that any failure to engage correctly with the world is your failure, and instead says, ‘Maybe there has been a severe lack of imagination and empathy in the way society has been structured and rules made.’”
It’s an appealing idea for the little boy who dreamed of being adopted by Christopher Lee and moving to LA as his parents rowed outside his bedroom. But I can’t help wondering where that empathy is for the ‘surly’ world around him - after all, “you don’t know what is going on in my mind and I don’t know what is going on in yours.”
In any case, Robin has his truth. Whether it is the whole truth and what that truth will mean for him remains to be seen, but I applaud his honesty and wish him well on his journey.
Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal: My Adventures in Neurodiversity by Robin Ince
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Great review which highlights the tension between a neurodiverse individual and the others around them, and the impact of a diagnosis on that. The language around 'permission' is very telling - having a diagnosis does not give you a get-out-of-jail free card to behave exactly as you wish and blame the world around you for not accommodating it. Social contract and all that. I personally found the chapter in Robin's book headed "Am I an arsehole?" personally quite triggering. My ex partner had mental health issues that got significantly worse during our relationship. He treated me horribly, and wouldn't meaningfully engage in treatment or therapy that might have helped him. For several years I tried to be understanding of this, and excused his behaviour (and my misery and depression resulting from his abuse) to family and friends on the grounds of his mental health problems, and that we all just needed to work harder to understand and accommodate him. Only one friend sat me down and said, "Yes, he might have these issues, but he is also being a **** and you need to leave."
As you point out in your review, we contain multitudes and different aspects of our personality and behaviour - especially those perceived as negative and with impacts on those around us in our personal and professional lives - can be hard to parse out and are not easily boxed and explained (or worse, excused) by a simple diagnosis.
I do think an underrated part of mental health management is learning to distrust your own first instincts or impressions. In many cases, the way you understand people, pick up their social cues, react to their actions, can be misunderstood through the warping lens of mental illness. The modern solution of the world being more accommodating is important. But in the process the equal responsibility of the sufferer to acknowledge his impaired judgment, to second-guess himself, to apologize when misjudging, seems to have been absolved. It’s now referred to as “masking”, and the expectation is regarded as almost an abuse of the sufferer. But if you refuse to acknowledge where your behaviour has crossed a reasonable social norm, all you are doing is declaring a Victim Olympics, where the rules of engagement are always set by whoever is suffering the most.
Taking a real-life example, I burst out crying a couple of days ago when the cafeteria guy accidentally put sauce on my meat. I’m pregnant, overwhelmed, anxious and depressed, suffering from heat. I have every diagnostic reason in the world to explain my reaction. But that doesn’t change the fact that it was an overreaction and a shitty way to treat someone in service. So I apologized, without excuse. And I don’t feel like that is the kind of response that is encouraged in a mental-illness-identitarian approach.