From Unilad and LADBible to ADHD advocate: Alex Partridge’s remarkable story

Unilad and LADBible founder Alex Partridge, who was diagnosed with ADHD two years ago, and has written a book abou his experiences. Photo / Luke Hamlin

Alex Partridge created one of the seminal websites of the 2010s, then lost it, then endured a five-year legal battle that nearly killed him, then won it back, then sold it for enough money that he never needed to work again. Those are not the most interesting things about him.

Before it had even started, this interview had ruined Alex Partridge’s day. It didn’t begin until after 8pm on a work day, but he’d been unable to get any work done all day for worry. He’d been pacing his flat, hoping for a cancellation. When I was late, and he believed I might not show, he thought to himself: “This is the best news ever.”

Not only does the Unilad and LADBible founder have a book to promote, he hosts a hit ADHD-focused podcast called ADHD Chatter, has 300,000 followers on Instagram and has a busy speaking schedule. He receives many emails each day requiring immediate action, but on this day he had not been able to read a single one. He knew this would mean a spate of follow-up emails, to which he would have to write the embarrassing reply: “I wasn’t able to action it because I was waiting for a meeting.”

When he told me this, soon after we started talking, I assumed he was exaggerating. He wasn’t. “I’ve been waiting for this call all day, basically,” he told me, “unable to do much else.”

This was an interview he – or at least his publicity people – had organised and pitched to the Herald. It was an interview he had wanted to do.

He knew his fears were irrational, but that didn’t make him better able to control them. He said he felt unqualified to write the book he had just written, let alone talk to a journalist about having written it.

The book, called Now It All Makes Sense, tells the story of a life lived knowing he was different, but finding out why only two years ago, when he was 34.

Although it’s no longer unusual for high-profile people to share the stories of their mental health struggles, it’s extremely unusual for them to share those stories with such brutal honesty, rawness and vulnerability.

Alex Partridge was diagnosed two years ago. Photo / Andrew Mason

The lead-up to Partridge’s diagnosis began a few years ago when, on impulse, he decided to start a business podcast. He called it Walk Away Wiser. Over the course of three hours, he spent a small fortune on recording equipment, cameras and tripods, then dismantled his bedroom and turned it into a soundproof studio. He hired a producer and booked a series of high-profile guests. Three days later, when the equipment was delivered, he no longer had any interest in doing the podcast.

He told the producer he was pulling the pin. The producer replied: “When did you get your ADHD diagnosis?”

Speaking with his partner afterwards, Partridge realised this was part of a long-running pattern in his life: high excitement and impulsive action followed by complete loss of interest – what he calls the “boom-bust cycle”.

Screening for mental health conditions like ADHD is covered under the UK’s NHS, but waiting lists are two to seven years, so he paid nearly $2000 for a private consultation, for which the wait was only three months. He filled out a lengthy questionnaire, and so did his mum and partner. Afterwards, his psychologist told him: “Your report will come in about a week, but I can tell you now that I think it’s clear as hell that you have ADHD.”

He got his diagnosis two years ago. He says it was the beginning of a “grieving process” that is still ongoing.

“You look back through this lens of ADHD and you sort of put context and meaning to a lot of behaviour. I think that’s a process that probably never ends.”

ADHD is now, more or less, his obsession. The book, the podcast, the speaking circuit: he finds almost all of it agonising. He is unable to sleep the night before he gives a talk, even though he has done it over and over for years and knows, because people tell him, that he’s good at it.

He is able to put on a mask and play the character of someone delivering a talk. It’s a performance with clear parameters and a script. Social encounters, however…

“I feel like there’s the risk of anxiously over-sharing and saying something that they didn’t need to know or I’m going to regret saying. I’ve just met them – why would I feel I have to over-share in order to increase the chance of that person liking me? Then I’ll walk away from that situation overthinking what I’ve just said because I shouldn’t have told them that I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder 10 years ago, because they don’t need to know that. Then I won’t sleep for days because I’ve over-shared. So if I don’t put myself in those situations, the chances of me saying something or doing something that is going to lead to days and weeks of anxiety will be smaller.”

Though ADHD can be treated with medication, Partridge manages it through other methods, such as exercise.

He had his first panic attack when he was 6: the teacher asked him a question and he felt all the other kids turn to look at him and his heart started racing. He ran out of class and told someone in the corridor to call an ambulance, thinking he was having a heart attack.

Another time at school, one of his schoolmates told him: “You could be one of the cool kids, Alex, if you weren’t so weird.”

When he was 16, he was wrongly diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder. He was prescribed beta blockers and antidepressants, but says they made him feel worse, so he stopped taking them.

After finishing secondary school, he remained living at home with his parents, racked with anxiety, afraid of leaving the house.

He eventually left to attend university aged 20. During his first lecture, he had an anxiety attack and left the room. He never went to another. Soon after, he started a website called Unilad from his bedroom, leaving only to eat, drink and use the toilet. Within three weeks, Unilad had a million followers. Soon after that, it was earning him more money than he could have made in a year after graduating university.

He dropped out, moved back in with his parents and started another website, called LADBible. No longer able to do it alone, he placed an advertisement and met with two people he thought could help. He says his intuition told him not to trust them, but he signed a document they gave him, and soon after he was removed from the business.

In the book, he writes of that moment: “I remember staring at my computer screen, unable to access Unilad, paralysed with overwhelm and crippled by anxiety. I was not equipped to handle this situation.”

He drove to a petrol station, bought a bottle of wine, drove home and drank it in five minutes.

So began both his struggles with alcoholism and his five-year legal battle to win back control of Unilad.

When his solicitor told him his case was going to trial, his mind flashed forward to being in the witness box, having to give evidence in front of the court, then flashed back to his first panic attack at school. He ran out of the solicitor’s office, bought a bottle of vodka and woke up in hospital the next morning. A nurse told him a member of the public had found him in an alleyway clutching the bottle of vodka and when he tried to get away, he fell and hit his head.

He was overwhelmed by shame and anxiety and felt the way to cure it was to get more alcohol. He stood up and ran out of the hospital, but security had been called and before he knew it he was in the back of a police car.

“I remember my parents had been called and they were looking at me through the window of the police car with this look of fear and desperation in their eyes and they didn’t know how to help me or what was wrong with me.”

That was one of “about three” alcohol-related hospital visits he had in the three months leading up to the trial. After one binge, a nurse told him one more drink and he would have died of alcohol poisoning.

When the court case began, his parents had to chaperone him from his hotel to the courtroom every day because he couldn’t be sure he wasn’t going to take a detour to the bottle shop.

The trial lasted three weeks. He was on the stand for six days. He had to take numerous toilet breaks to avert panic attacks. He was sick in the toilet numerous times.

Three months later, his solicitor rang and told him he’d won everything.

Alex Partridge, creator and founder of websites Unilad and LADBible. Photo / Tanya Grace

“It sounds quite theatrical, but I remember just falling to my knees and bursting into tears because it was a five-year legal case; but it was the mental health battle really for me that was the bigger threat and it nearly killed me.”

He became an instant multimillionaire. He was 29. He booked a trip to Las Vegas. He has no memory of what happened there, but when he arrived back he had an infected tattoo on his arm and was admitted to hospital for alcohol withdrawal treatment.

Soon after, he went to his first Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting where he said what he describes as the most important sentence of his life: “My name is Alex and I’m an alcoholic.”

Partridge sought refuge in alcohol for several years before getting sober. Photo / 123rf

His ADHD manifests in many ways. He says it’s the reason he is creative, great in a crisis, intuitive, resilient, hyper-focused, spontaneous, entrepreneurial, empathetic, courageous and a risk-taker.

But there are also negatives, like the boom-and-bust cycles, which are testing for his relationship with his partner, who he’s been with for five years.

“I can be super-excited about going to the cinema or going out for dinner or going on a holiday and I’ll book the holiday or I’ll book the restaurant or book the cinema and then we’ll be in the taxi and I don’t want to go any more.”

He says they’ll sometimes be sitting in the theatre and he’ll be desperately tapping his foot, desperate to go because his mind has moved on to something else.

He also has an “intense, visceral, physiological” reaction to anything he perceives as rejection that often causes him to shut down. The medical name for this is rejection-sensitive dysphoria (RSD) and is common in people who have ADHD.

“I’m very aware of people’s changes in facial expressions and tone of voice, little micro-movements. If your tone of voice changes slightly, I hear that and automatically think, oh gosh, that person doesn’t like me.”

He tells a story:

“One of the things I’m proud of being able to do is making pancakes. I love making pancakes for people, I always have. I made pancakes for my partner – we’ve been together for five years – and I stood over there and I was mixing all the ingredients together and she said, ‘You’re putting the ingredients in the bowl in the wrong order’ and I just instantly went – my mood went – from euphoria, excitement about the evening ahead, to instant internalised sadness because she criticised the way I was making pancakes. That’s the insanity of it.”

He stormed out of the room. It was half an hour before he felt able to return and apologise.

“It’s not easy because, for the non-ADHD partner, it’s not fair for them to feel like they have to be treading on eggshells all the time.”

If he is out with his partner, he has developed a signal where he taps her on the shoulder to indicate that he’s been triggered and needs to leave for half an hour to recover.

“These strategies, they sound good on paper, but in reality I’m a 36-year-old man having to remove myself from a situation for half an hour because a comment has triggered me. It is so shameful.”

He says he likes meeting new people, but in a controlled way. With guests on his podcast ADHD Chatter, for instance, he knows he’s going to meet the guest in the studio, have a conversation for two hours and he probably won’t see them again.

“They’ve come into my life, we’ve had an interaction and the parameters of that are very clear. So I know there’s that expectation there and there’s a short-enough time for me to maintain that version of me that I’m happy to present, and my social battery is not going to run out and I’m not going to go awkward or weird and then worry about being awkward or weird for the next few weeks.”

If you ask a doctor what ADHD is, he says, they would tell you it’s “a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by traits of impulsivity and forgetfulness”.

But, he says, that definition misses something important.

“It’s really a lifetime of being misunderstood and being told that you’re too much and you’re too sensitive and not understanding why you have to change your entire personality just to be more liked by whoever you’re standing in front of on that day. It’s not knowing why you’re so sensitive to rejection and you struggle to maintain friendships.”

But, he says, once you understand why you’re that way, everything begins to change. You find your community, begin peeling back your masks, and realise you no longer have to pretend.

“You were never broken,” he says. “You were just different.”

Now It All Makes Sense: How An ADHD Diagnosis Brought Clarity To My Life by Alex Partridge is out on January 16, published by Sheldon Press