Before she became the environmental activist we know today, Greta Thunberg, now 17, was in a bad place, battling depression. ‘Three or four years [earlier], she stopped talking, stopped eating and stopped going to school. She was basically at home for a year,’ her father, 50-year-old Svante Thunberg told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. ‘She didn’t eat for two and a half months, which was the ultimate nightmare, as a parent.’
In the Thunberg family’s newly published book, Our House is on Fire: Scenes of a Family and a Planet in Crisis, her mother Malena Ernman adds, ‘She was slowly disappearing into some kind of darkness and, little by little, bit by bit, she seemed to stop functioning.’ Greta was eventually diagnosed, says Malena, with ‘Asperger’s, high-functioning autism and…
