ADHD, Marriage & Growth with Daniel Buckley #185

Daniel Buckley was thirty-two before he had a name for what was going on in his head. For as long as he could remember he had been restless, discontented, unable to sit still or hold his focus on anything that didn’t grip him - and he had simply assumed that was him. That was the way he was, and the way life was.

His wife Simone saw it long before he did. For more than a decade she told him something wasn’t right, that he couldn’t rest, that he had no structure. He wasn’t ready to hear it. The day before she died, after years of illness, she went through his symptoms one by one and asked him to get help for his ADHD.

Daniel tells Laura what happened next - the newspaper article that felt like a tap on the shoulder, the Irish clinics that never rang him back, the trip to England to be assessed at all. He is open about drinking to escape thoughts he had no other way of managing, about the day he stopped, and about the ordinary moment months later when he heard his son laughing outside an open window and realised he had never felt peace before. It’s also the story of what he built out of it: a service designed, in his words, to get people to a clinician in weeks rather than years.

🔑 Key Points

He spent thirty-two years assuming that was just who he was

Restless, discontented, unable to focus — Daniel had no framework for any of it until he was assessed at thirty-two.

Simone saw it more than a decade before he accepted it

He only heard it the day before she died, when she went through his symptoms and asked him to get help.

Undiagnosed ADHD and alcohol are closely linked

Daniel describes drinking to escape feelings he couldn’t regulate. He stopped in August 2022, so he could be the father his son deserved.

There was no route to a diagnosis in Ireland

Public waiting lists ran to years, and not one of the private clinics he rang or emailed came back to him. He was assessed in England instead.