Danny O'donoghue says PTSD diagnosis followed Mark Sheehan death

Danny O'Donoghue says he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after Mark Sheehan died in April 2023. The Script frontman was 45 when he described how grief after losing his bandmate and best mate of 30 years finally pushed him into therapy.

Mark Sheehan and The Script

Sheehan died at 46 after a brief undisclosed illness, leaving O'Donoghue to confront a loss that was both personal and professional. The pair had been friends since they were 13, and along with Glen Power they formed The Script in 2001.

O'Donoghue said he could not cry at the funeral. “I spoke at the funeral, I sang at the funeral. And I didn't cry.” He added: “It was very unlike me - I'll cry at a Disney movie. I'm super, hyper emotional. I was like, this is going to go bad.”

Therapy after the funeral

That numbness drove him to seek help after a friend handed him the number of a therapist. “It was there I learned I had post-traumatic stress disorder,” he said. O'Donoghue also said, “I knew grief. I knew this was going to bottleneck at some point and hit me bad.”

He described a long stretch of avoidance before he took the problem seriously. “I spoke at the funeral, I sang at the funeral. And I didn't cry.” He said he spent a year “half bull****ing the therapist” while still partying, and leaned on drink, cigarettes and weed after Sheehan's death.

27 December and after

O'Donoghue said he finally quit everything cold turkey on 27 December after a drink-soaked Christmas in Dublin. “Enough's enough. My relationships were suffering over my selfishness,” he said. Therapy, he added, changed his life “absolutely” and transformed his relationship with his wife, Anais Naing.

He also drew a line back to an earlier loss. “Mark's [death] was probably the heaviest I've had, because when my dad died, I had Mark, but now Mark passed away I didn't have anybody.” The diagnosis turns what looked like private grief into a longer health story: O'Donoghue is not describing a brief mourning period, but the kind of breakdown that can follow when support disappears and the coping habits become the problem.