Tommy Hilfiger's daughter Ally, 31, was bitten by a tick on her stomach when she was only seven years old in the summer of 1992.

Her mother carefully removed it with tweezers and no one thought about it again until 11 years later, after Ally had been committed to a psychiatric hospital and gone through no less than 12 doctors.

Her constant bouts of strep throat, emotional insecurity, pain in her knees and difficulty concentrating had everyone fooled as to what they were dealing with in the early years – until an astute doctor years viewed her symptoms as being Lyme disease.

The disease is ‘a multisystemic illness that can affect the central nervous system causing neurologic and psychiatric symptoms’, according to the National Institute of Health.

Famed fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger's daughter Ally, 31, was bitten by a tick when she was seven years old and suffered bouts of strep throat, emotional insecurity, pain in her knees and difficulty concentrating for years before being diagnosed with Lyme disease

Ally was raised in leafy green Greenwich, Connecticut, and vacationed with her family in Nantucket and the Hamptons. No one in the family remembers where the tick was removed, but by third grade, some two years later, she had difficulty concentrating and remembering anything she had read moments earlier

By the time Ally was diagnosed, she had been committed to a psychiatric hospital and gone through no less than twelve doctors. Pictured above, Ally smiles with her husband, Steve Hash (left), their daughter, and Ally's father, Tommy (right)

Infected ticks are found in woodland areas throughout North America and the UK.

Ally, now a producer and actress, faced more than a decade of undiagnosed mental and emotional agony all from the bite of a tiny deer tick infected with a bacterium or spirochete.

‘I was convinced that bugs were crawling in my body. I could feel them eating at my organs, my stomach and especially my brain,’ Ally Hilfiger writes in her new book, Bite Me: How Lyme Disease Stole My Childhood, Made Me Crazy, and Almost Killed Me, which was published by Center Street Books, a division of Hachette.

‘I wasn’t me anymore. I was a weakly projected image of myself on a wall, crying out for someone to help me and figure out what was wrong’.

I wasn’t me anymore. I was a weakly projected image of myself on a wall, crying out for someone to help me and figure out what was wrong.

Easier said than done.

Ally was raised in leafy green Greenwich, Connecticut, and vacationed with her family in Nantucket and the Hamptons.

No one in the family remembers where the tick was removed, but by third grade, some two years later, she had difficulty concentrating and remembering anything she had read moments earlier.

The pain in her knees was getting worse, and she suffered bouts of strep throat and emotional outbursts.

‘It was as if a force came over me that I couldn’t control, as if a demon took over my being,' she writes in her book.

Her emotional insecurity soared when she imagined that people wanted to be her friend just because of her famous father.

When she laughed, she peed spontaneously in her pants because she just couldn’t help herself.

Ally was bitten by a tick on her stomach when she was only seven years old in the summer of 1992. Her mother carefully removed it with tweezers and no one thought about it again until 11 years later

Learning that her parents were divorcing accelerated her acute anxiety and panic attacks until she collapsed and had to be rushed to the hospital grasping for air.

She was prescribed Klonopin, a benzodiazepine used to prevent seizures and panic disorders. It turned her into a sweaty mess.

Her parents, thinking she was just being overdramatic, took her to sports doctors who treated her for arthritis.

One did test her for Lyme Disease, because Greenwich - where she grew up - was right in the bull’s eye of Lyme disease country. The tests came back borderline positive.

Not enough to declare it was Lyme, the doctor said, however, and then suggested that it was multiple sclerosis, based on her blurred vision, joint pain and muscle weakness.

As Ally got older, she needed something to stop the pain so she started smoking weed - a lot of it.

It was more fun and made her less angry and frustrated.

She smoked anywhere from the Sheep Meadow in Central Park to the park at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus, across from her high school.

Buddhist teachings, chanting classes, a healer who suggested tapping on the third eye twenty-one times – it helped only momentarily because she didn’t keep any of it up. She abandoned it all for smoking pot.

Nothing really changed the ‘brain fog’ that consumed her from what she calls her ‘Lyme brain’, which left her confused, susceptible to getting lost all the time and not being able to read street signs.

WHAT IS LYME DISEASE? Lyme disease, or Lyme borreliosis, is a bacterial infection spread to humans by infected ticks. Ticks are tiny spider-like creatures found in woodland and heath areas throughout the UK and in other parts of Europe and North America. Many people with early-stage Lyme disease develop a distinctive circular rash at the site of the tick bite, usually around 3 to 30 days after being bitten. Some also experience flu-like symptoms in the early stages, such as tiredness, muscle pain, joint pain, headaches, fever, chills and neck stiffness. More serious symptoms may develop several weeks, months or even years later if Lyme disease is left untreated or is not treated early. These include pain and swelling of the joints, problems affecting the nervous system - including numbness and pain in the limbs - facial paralysis, memory problems and difficulty concentrating. Lyme disease can also lead to heart problems such as myocarditis, where the heart muscle becomes inflamed and heart failure. Meningitis is also a risk. A small minority of people go on to develop long-term symptoms similar to those of fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome, called post-infectious Lyme disease. Source: NHS Choices Advertisement

Ally worried that she was just getting dumber, her brain function deteriorating and her vision getting dimmer.

Overwhelmed with ambivalence about her career direction, she attributed it to being the daughter of a famous designer.

She had put him on a pedestal and didn’t think she was worthy to stand up next to him.

Barely holding it all together in high school with her mini breakdowns, hangovers and grass highs, she was too confused with what ‘felt like vibrating fire running through her veins and head’.

Her father, Tommy Hilfiger leaned on her too much emotionally, she reasons and she grew up too fast without much parental guidance, no boundaries.

He’d pour his heart out to her about business and his own personal life and affairs while in the back of a limo or cab.

She was too young to handle his emotions while dealing with her own confusion that made her feel lonely and alone.

She didn’t want to be his peer or his confidante. She wanted just to be his little girl.

‘Nobody believes you about the pain and confusion,' she writes in her book. ‘Your family, your friends, and even your doctors tell you it’s all in your head.

‘You feel like s**t and they tell you you’re beautiful, you’re young and you look fabulous.'

Ally (pictured left in an undated photograph of her younger years) smoked marijuana to ease the pain she was facing as her Lyme disease went undiagnosed

But when the fainting spells took over, the extreme fatigue or nausea, joint pain or migraines and heart palpitations, Ally broke down.

Somehow, she got herself together enough to pitch a show, Rich Girls to MTV and it got the green light - with her co-starring, something she never anticipated or wanted.

It only increased her anxiety and paranoia. She wasn’t well and kept saying, ‘There are bugs in me, there’s something foreign living inside of me’.

She also was channeling Bob Marley and speaking in a singsong Rasta accent.

When Ally was 18, Tommy decided she needed rehab. He was worried about the volumes of weed that she was smoking.

He wasn’t getting the message. I got out of bed, grabbed a silver tray off a table, went into the bathroom, defecated on it, and handed it to him.

Her mother said Ally need to see a psychic.

Tommy flew to Colorado on business the next day and got a call from Ally that changed everything.

He feared for her life and went to the airport in the middle of the night and a snowstorm and headed right back east.

Ally woke up the next morning to find him in the kitchen.

She was angry that he wasn’t responding to her telling him something was wrong with her - maybe the parasites.

‘He wasn’t getting the message. I got out of bed, grabbed a silver tray off a table, went into the bathroom, defecated on it, and handed it to him,' she writes.

‘You’ve gotta get this tested. If there are parasites in there you’re going to be sorry’, she told him.

Ally remembers standing in her mother’s kitchen, in the house across the street from her father’s, and smashing plates while talking about her Bob Marley obsession.

Tommy heard what she had been doing and said, ‘I’ll take you to the airport and we’ll go to Jamaica'.

Ally got herself together, packed a suitcase and came downstairs ready to go when her father grabbed her, shoved some pills down her throat and with the help of her mother’s security guard, took her out to the car.

Ally (right with co-star Jaime Gleicher) also revealed that her undiagnosed Lyme disease was to blame for the dumb lines she came out with her on her short-lived reality TV show on MTV called 'Rich Girls'

She was loaded into the back seat with a security guard on either side and driven to Silver Hill Hospital, a psychiatric hospital hidden in the recesses of bucolic New Canaan, Connecticut that has treated Judy Garland, Liza Minelli, Truman Capote, Joan Kennedy and Greg Allman.

Upon arrival, she was immediately injected with something that put her to sleep and she remained heavily medicated for weeks on every psychiatric drug until she was assigned to another doctor.

‘I was saddened by, and furious about, my dad’s actions and to be honest, sometimes I’m still angry with him for what he did’

Ally Hilfiger details how the debilitating disease affected her life in her new book, Bite Me

‘When my heart is clear, however, I know that he saved my life. I had to go through the darkness if I was to shed any light on the disease I didn’t even know I had’.

One morning the curtains were thrown open, the sunlight filled the room and a new doctor was in charge of Ally’s care, Dr Ellyn Shander.

This turned out to be one of the most impactful relationships in Ally’s life.

Dr Shander stopped the psychotic drugs and helped direct Ally to finding her own inner strength.

She recommended Ally leave the hospital after four months but still visit her in her office twice a week.

She left the hospital with the same disease she had come in with, but came out with a new beginning.

Back in an office visit with Shander, Ally talked about all the pain she had been living through and Shander now suspected it could be Lyme disease.

This started Ally on the path of seeing 12 doctors in her long running battle against the insidious disease that had been dormant in her body for 11 years.

She saw herbalists, Chinese medicine men, homeopathic/holistic doctors, underwent extensive detox treatments, had electromagnetic waves sent into her body to reset her nervous system.

One doctor performed twenty injections in a ring on her stomach.

Cleansing diets were ordered consisting of no gluten, dairy or sugar.

All the years of antibiotics had destroyed her insides but she came through it learning that she would never be one hundred percent cured.

But she had acquired ‘a toolbox for myself and filled it with spiritual and physical methods to help me get through anything my disease threw at me’.

And she fell in love with a music man, Steve Hash, married, moved to Los Angeles and they now have a baby girl.