Lewis Capaldi has announced that he has been diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome - and is learning to live with twitches and the condition itself.
The 25-year-old Scottish Singer says that his decision to go public with the diagnosis was due to the fact that he doesn't want his fans thinking he is 'taking cocaine or something'.
He has also opened up about his discovery of the condition which causes a person to make involuntary sounds and movements known as 'tics'.
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The Mirror reports that Lewis, who releases a new single this Friday (September 9), explained how he was relieved to find out it was Tourette's and not a degenerative disease as he first worried. He also said that he can now see signs that he had the condition when looking back at old interviews.
The Someone You Loved singer is being treated with Botox injections, hopeful of freezing muscles to try and control the sporadic tics, reassuring fans that it's 'not as bad as it looks'.
In an interview with The Sun, Lewis said: "I have been diagnosed with Tourette’s. I wanted to speak about it because I didn’t want people to think I was taking cocaine or something.
"My shoulder twitches when I am excited, happy, nervous or stressed. It is something I am living with. It is not as bad as it looks."
Lewis' debut album Divinely Uninspired To A Hellish Extent made the Top 10 charts for a record-breaking 77 weeks consecutive from its release in 2019 - with his first single Someone You Loved propelling him to international fame prior.
Lewis recently told fans during an Instagram Live chat how the diagnosis now 'makes so much sense', after re-watching some video interviews from the early days of career in 2018 where he can 'can see that I’m doing it [tics]' when revisiting the old footage. The singer - who releases new music for the first time in three years at the end of the week - described Tourette's as 'a new thing' and explained how he is learning new ways to cope with the condition all the time.
He described some days as 'more painful than others, sometimes it's quite uncomfortable', but it 'comes and goes' and he can sometimes go months without experiencing it. "I thought I had some horrible degenerative disease so I’ll take Tourette’s," he added when opening up about his health - amid his comeback to the spotlight after some time away working on his second album.
According to the NHS, Tourette's syndrome usually starts during childhood, but the tics and other symptoms usually improve after several years and sometimes go away completely. There's no cure for Tourette's syndrome, but treatment can help manage symptoms.
Over recent years, a number of high-profile figures and celebrities have revealed they have Tourette's syndrome, including singer Billie Eilish who was diagnosed with the condition at the age of 11.
Speaking about her symptoms with David Letterman earlier this year, the Bad Guy singer said: "I don't tic at all, because the main tics that I do constantly, all day long, are like, I wiggle my ear back and forth and raise my eyebrow and click my jaw ... and flex my arm here and flex this arm, flex these muscles.
"These are things you would never notice if you're just having a conversation with me, but for me, they're very exhausting."
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