Bruce Willis "never connected the dots" that he has dementia.
According to Bruce’s wife, Emma Heming Willis, the beloved actor never realized that he had frontotemporal dementia.
Emma opened up about this suring her appearance on the Conversations with Cam podcast.
“Bruce never, never tapped in,” she told host Cameron Oaks Rogers.
“I think that's like the blessing and the curse of this, is that he never connected the dots that he had this disease, and I'm really happy about that. I'm really happy that he doesn't know about it,” she shared about the Die Hard star, 70.
She revealed that Bruce had anosognosia, a condition where your braind can’t recognize a health condition as its own health declines. It is commonly seen in people with mental health disorders.
As Emma put it, “it's where your brain can't identify what is happening to it,” so the Sixth Sense actor, and others with anosognosia, “think this is their normal.”
“People think this might be denial, like they don't want to go to the doctor because they're like, ‘I'm fine, I'm fine,’ actually, this is the anosognosia that comes into play. It's not denial. It's just that their brain is changing. This is a part of the disease,” she said.
Bruce’s family shared in 2023 that he had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, a condition in which the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes go through fast degeneration. It results in speech loss, emotional problems and major changes in personality.