“Nobody Believes Me”: Brad Pitt’s Makes a Heartbreaking Confession About His Rare Disorder
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Brad Pitt believes he has undiagnosed prosopagnosia.
The condition affects a person’s ability to recognize faces.
Pitt said he has struggled with it for years, and that it has often made him come off as egotistical and smug in social situations.
Brad Pitt fears he has created a false image of himself: one that is aloof, remote, inaccessible, and self-absorbed, he recently told GQ. But the reality is, he believes he struggles with undiagnosed prosopagnosia, also known as “face blindness.”
The problem is especially present when Pitt attends parties or social gatherings. “Nobody believes me!” he said. “I wanna meet another.” And he’s experienced the symptoms for years—in 2013, he told Esquire they discouraged him from leaving the house.
“So many people hate me because they think I’m disrespecting them,” he said at the time. “So I swear to God, I took one year where I just said, this year, I’m just going to cop to it and say to people, ‘Okay, where did we meet?’ But it just got worse. People were more offended.”
He continued: “Every now and then, someone will give me context, and I’ll say, ‘Thank you for helping me.’ But I piss more people off. You get this thing, like, ‘You’re being egotistical. You’re being conceited.’ But it’s a mystery to me, man. I can’t grasp a face and yet I come from such a design/aesthetic point of view. I am going to get it tested.”
He hasn’t been evaluated yet, he told GQ, but diagnosis usually requires a series of face recognition tests conducted by a neurologist.
So, what is prosopagnosia?
The condition, also known as “face blindness,” is characterized by abnormalities, damage, or impairment in the right fusiform gyrus, a fold in the brain that contributes to facial perception and memory, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). It affects a person’s ability to recognize faces. The severity of the condition varies, from not being able to recognize the faces of friends and family members to the inability to distinguish any face at all.
What causes prosopagnosia?
There are two types of prosopagnosia, each with its own cause.
Developed prosopagnosia: Some people are born with prosopagnosia without having experienced any brain damage, which is a type also known as developmental prosopagnosia, per the United Kingdom’s National Health Service. This type often runs in families and is believed to be the result of genetic mutation or deletion, per the NINDS.
Then there’s acquired prosopagnosia or the onset of it after brain trauma. It can result from stroke, traumatic brain injury, or certain neurodegenerative diseases, per the NINDS.
Prosopagnosia treatments
While there’s no one universal treatment for prosopagnosia, therapy often involves learning compensatory strategies to enact in social situations where facial recognition is needed. Treatment often involves learning strategies to turn to in social situations. The NINDS says adults whose condition followed a stroke or brain trauma, however, can be retrained to use other clues for recognition with the help of various therapies.
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