Greta Thunberg’s extraordinary transformation from a near-mute 11-year-old into the world’s most powerful voice on the climate crisis was revealed yesterday by her mother.
In an emotional account, Malena Ernman describes how her daughter came to be diagnosed with autism, and how activism helped her overcome an eating disorder.
Ernman writes of the first indications that her elder daughter was unwell in extracts published in the Observer from Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis, a book by the whole Thunberg family.
Photo: AP
“She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness,” Ernman says. “She stopped playing the piano. She stopped laughing. She stopped talking. And she stopped eating.”
Ernman, a celebrated Swedish opera singer, and her husband, Svante Thunberg, an actor, struggled to deal with their daughter’s silence and refusal to eat anything except tiny amounts of rice, avocado and gnocchi.
She lost 10kg in two months and was on the verge of being admitted to hospital before turning a corner. Yet when Thunberg returned to school, her father realized she was being bullied.
“The school isn’t sympathetic,” Ernman writes. “Their understanding of the situation is different. It’s Greta’s own fault, the school thinks.”
After recovering some weight, Thunberg was assessed by psychiatrists and diagnosed with “high-functioning” autism, which Ernman describes as Asperger’s, as well as obsessive compulsive disorder.
She went on to become attuned to the climate crisis, with the pivotal moment coming during a film shown in class about rubbish in the oceans, “an island of plastic” in the South Pacific.
“She saw what the rest of us did not want to see. It was as if she could see our CO2 emissions with her naked eye,” her mother writes.
In the summer of 2018, Thunberg began her first school strike, taking a homemade placard to stand outside the Swedish prime minister’s office.
When she was joined by other activists, her father tried to persuade her to go home, aware of the emotional toll it was taking on he, but she refused, her mother writes.
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