Actress Erin Moriarty is speaking candidly about the difficult health journey that eventually led to a Graves’ disease diagnosis — and the emotional fallout that followed.
In a personal essay published by Time, the 31-year-old reflected on the years she spent struggling with unexplained symptoms while continuing to work on The Boys.
“I found out the heartbreaking way that a medically confused woman is rarely considered credible,” Moriarty wrote.
The actress explained that her symptoms began surfacing in late 2023, gradually affecting nearly every part of her life. Along with intense fatigue, she described dealing with numbness in her hands and feet, heart palpitations, urinary pain, and dramatic mood swings.
“It became incapacitating. I began sleeping through every alarm. On weekends, I would sleep 19 hours (or more) straight,” she wrote.
Moriarty said the most alarming change was the effect the illness had on her cognition and memory while she was actively filming.
“My short-term memory deteriorated so severely that learning even simple lines became difficult — terrifying when you’re filming a television show,” she shared.
As doctors searched for answers and referred her to specialists, Moriarty said she also struggled with the public scrutiny surrounding changes in her appearance and health.
“I was going through the physical hell of chronic illness on a public stage,” she wrote. “Doing it in private is emotionally damaging enough, but to have my physical symptoms be speculated about, trivialized, and dismissed was devastating.”
She eventually learned in May 2025 that she had Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid and can cause symptoms including insomnia, anxiety, weight loss, fatigue, and rapid heartbeat.
“The day my life began again,” Moriarty wrote of finally receiving a diagnosis, “was not because it instantly fixed everything, but because it finally gave shape to the chaos.”
But while treatment helped improve her physical symptoms, Moriarty said it also forced her to confront the emotional toll the illness had taken over the previous two years.
Months later, she revealed she was hospitalized following what she described as a “severe mental-health crisis.”
“I had been hormonally dysregulated, cognitively impaired, and psychologically untethered for so long that recovery didn’t bring me peace,” she wrote. “It brought me clarity.”
That clarity, she explained, also brought grief over the time and opportunities she felt the illness had taken from her.
“For what this illness had taken from me professionally, creatively, relationally, psychologically,” Moriarty wrote. “I spent at least two years of my life physically present but mentally unreachable.”
The Gen V actress said she ultimately chose to go public with her story in hopes that others — especially women dealing with chronic health issues — feel encouraged to advocate for themselves sooner.
“Silence has consequences. Ignorance does, too,” she wrote.
Moriarty closed the essay with a message urging people to listen to their bodies before symptoms escalate.
“The body speaks long before it screams,” she wrote. “Listen to yourself before your body is forced to scream loud enough for the world to hear it, too.”
If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health challenges, emotional distress, substance use problems, or just needs someone to talk to, call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org.
