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Tallulah Willsi
Karwai Tang/WireImage
Tallulah Willis revealed this week that she was diagnosed with autism last summer, writing on Instagram that the discovery “changed my life.”
Willis, the youngest daughter of Bruce Willis and his ex-wife Demi Moore, posted an old family video on Instagram of her as a child playing with her father’s ear while on a red carpet.
“Tell me your (sic) autistic without telling me your (sic) autistic,” Willis captioned the post. In the comments section, she explained: “This is actually the first time I’ve publicly shared my diagnosis,” she wrote. “I discovered it this summer and it changed my life.”
Willis’ announcement is not the first time he has spoken candidly about his health. In an essay published in Fashion Last summer, he reflected on his struggle with anorexia, which he said at the time he had dealt with for four years.
“After getting sober in my 20s, restricting food seemed like the last vice I could hold on to,” she wrote. “When I was 25, I was admitted to a residential treatment center in Malibu to address the depression I had lived with throughout my teenage years. It was a largely therapeutic experience; For the first time I felt sorry for the ugly duckling, a 15-year-old misfit. I was also diagnosed with ADHD and started taking stimulant medications, which was transformative. I felt smart for the first time, but I also began to enjoy the appetite-suppressing side effect of the medications. I saw a way to banish the clumsy teenager in favor of a flighty little pixie.”
In the same essay, Willis also discussed his mental health amid his father’s decline following his diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia.
“I admit that I have faced Bruce’s decline in recent years with a dose of avoidance and denial that I am not proud of,” she wrote. “The truth is that I myself was too sick to bear it.”
She later added: “Now that I feel better I ask myself: How can I make him feel more comfortable? It wasn’t easy growing up in such a famous family, struggling like me to find a ray of light among the long shadows cast by my parents. But more and more I feel like I am in that light.”