Canadian radio host opens up for the first time about living with Tourette syndrome (VIDEO)
Roz Weston hosted Entertainment Tonight Canada for 17 years, and he kept a big secret from his colleagues every day.
“I would literally say that I had to pee all the time,” the 48-year-old told Daily Hive over Zoom. “Everybody who knows me thinks that I pee constantly because I would just leave the studio.”
What Weston was actually doing was going to his dressing room to let out his tics.
Now, with the recent release of his memoir A Little Bit Broken, the current co-host of The Roz and Mocha Show is done hiding this aspect of his life.
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Weston spoke publicly about living with Tourette syndrome (TS) for the very first time in his new book.
Then, in a TikTok and Instagram video that went viral, he showed the world what his tics look like in a long montage of ET Canada outtakes and other TV appearances.
The radio host says it rarely came up in interviews while promoting his memoir, which he was quite shocked about.
“I think talking about this stuff is still hard for people,” he told Daily Hive. “I put myself out there to normalize it.”
“He used to call me twitchy”
Weston was diagnosed with Tourette syndrome well into adulthood but says he doesn’t remember not having it.
“My brother and I spent every second together when we were kids, and he used to call me twitchy because I would just always have something going on in my face or my body,” he explained.
While the exact cause of TS isn’t known, research suggests that it is a disorder that affects the brain and nervous system, causing people to have tics.
Tics are sudden movements or sounds that people with TS do repeatedly. They usually can’t stop or control themselves when these tics happen.
There are two types of tics — motor and vocal.
Weston says he had minor vocal tics when he was younger. He hummed a lot and mimicked sounds, but these disappeared as he got older.
He mainly experiences motor tics now, which show up as sudden, repetitive flinches in his face, neck and eyes.
He says the best way to describe the feeling of tics is like finally scratching an itch in a very hard-to-reach place, but as soon as you scratch it, it comes back again.
“You can hold off on scratching it, but that feeling is just going to intensify and intensify and intensify,” explained Weston.
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When he was a kid, Weston says people never questioned his tics.
“The thing that sort of happens when you’re young is people just look at you, and they don’t know what it is, but their immediate reaction was never to ask a question, it was always just ‘don’t do that,'” he said.
On top of that, he says the only portrayal of TS he saw in the media was usually of a person shouting expletives uncontrollably.
So, when he was finally, officially diagnosed with TS as an adult, “it all made sense.”
“I took the diagnosis, and I walked out of the doctor’s office, and I never went for a follow-up appointment because I wasn’t interested in, at that point, being medicated,” Weston said.
The radio personality says he was also kicking an opioid addiction at the time, so the last thing he wanted was pills.
“As soon as I knew what [the tics] were, I knew that I could go through the rest of my life with that understanding that it is actually a thing, but that I was never going to tell anybody about it,” he said.
“I never wanted anyone to fuss over me”
In his TikTok and Instagram posts, which have garnered hundreds of thousands of views, Weston showed how he managed to mask his TS while working on a live TV show.
The former ET Canada host talks about how he’d force himself to yawn, so he could pull his neck a certain way, open his eyes super wide so he looked surprised, or close his eyes so he could roll them into the back of his head over and over again.
He says this effectively hid his tics because people thought he was just sleepy.
“I never wanted anyone to fuss over me,” said Weston. “And I never wanted anyone to think that I was holding them up.”
And in the video, he shares how much of a struggle it really was to hide his tics.
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Weston decided to show people what his tics look like to help open up conversations surrounding TS.
“Even today, we don’t talk about this stuff,” he said. “I know that there are a lot of moms who worry about their kids…I think, especially even for young men, we still keep things very much close to the chest, and embarrassment is still a big part of life.”
Throughout the TV host’s time at ET Canada, only one person knew about his TS — his director, Frank.
Weston details in his memoir how he went into Frank’s office to explain his condition.
“The only thing he said was ‘I got you,’ and if I ever needed a moment, he would give me that moment,” he told Daily Hive. “It was wonderful. I had an ally in a place where I needed somebody who was there to help.”
“The response has been really beautiful”
And now, Weston has become an ally to those who might have or know someone with TS.
“The response has been really beautiful,” he said.
He talks about reactions from parents who have reached out to him about their six-year-old, 10-year-old, or even 32-year-old with TS.
“My son has tics from Tourette’s as well,” commented one TikTok user on his video. “It’s encouraging to see so many people building awareness.”
Weston thought opening up about his TS would free him to “just tic all over the place all the time.”
But that’s not the case. He says he’s hidden and managed them for so long that it’s hard to just “let go.”
Weston also delves into his experiences with grief, addiction, and mental health in his new memoir.
He shared some words of advice for people going through hard times.
“The thing that I did not do my entire life is I never asked for help,” Weston said. “You owe it to yourself to exhaust all of your options when it comes to help.”
The radio host says that since his book was released, he’s been able to have deeper connections with his brother and fiancé Katherine (to whom he has dedicated the memoir).
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