My Greta was WASTING AWAY

A NEW MEMOIR WRITTEN BY GRETA THUNBERG'S WHOLE FAMILY LETS THE LID ON THE TEENAGE CLIMATE ACTIVIST'S TRAUMATIC CHILDHOOD BATTLES

Soon after Greta Thunberg started fifth grade, she was very depressed and wouldn’t eat. She was only 11, but faced being hospitalised and forcefed through tubes and IV. “She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and, little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning,” her mother, Malena Ernman, 49, explains in a new book the family has written. “She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And she stopped eating.”

In Our House Is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis, Ernman describes in wrenching detail the fear and powerlessness she and her actor husband Svante Thunberg underwent as they attempted to help Greta overcome her refusal to accept any food.

When Greta, now 17, did finally eat, the amount was minuscule — a few bits of rice or avocado. In desperation, her parents took her to eating disorder specialists, who suggested documenting everything she managed to ingest. One lunch of just five small pieces of gnocchi took two hours and 10 minutes.

Ernman turned to a school psychologist, who was the first to say that some of Greta’s behaviour suggested she could be on the autism spectrum.