Neuro Note on Still Alice

       The movie Still Alice is about a 50-year-old college professor named Alice Howland who slowly begins to experience problems associated with memory loss, such as forgetting certain words in her lectures and conversations and temporarily becoming lost on her runs on campus. She lives with her husband, who is a physician, and has three adult children. Alice goes to her doctor concerning these reoccurring problems and is eventually diagnosed with early onset familial Alzheimer’s disease. She and her husband sit down to tell her children, who then decide to go get genetically tested for this condition. One child ends up testing positive for the gene, one tests negative, and one chooses not to get tested at all. Since being diagnosed, Alice begins to forget recipes, place objects where they do not belong, and forget certain appointments and plans she has made with her husband. At the very beginning, she lists out a few personal questions in her phone that she progressively tries to answer as time passes in order to track the severity of her memory decline. Alice decides to go ahead and begin touring skilled nursing facilities to determine her plan of care and living as her disease progresses. She also chooses to make a video of herself on her laptop that she labels “Do not open until you can’t answer any of the questions” in which she describes to her “future self” where a bottle of sleeping pills are in her room that she can take in order to overdose and end her own life. After experiencing the emotional, physical, and mental stresses of her disease, Alice has the chance to speak at an Alzheimer’s convention. In her speech, she describes the fact that she feels like her memories are being “ripped away from her” and how no one ever takes her seriously because of her diagnosis. She tells her audience that she has good days and bad days, but ultimately she strives to value the times of joy and happiness and simply live in each moment she’s given. Shortly after her speech, Alice begins to no longer recognize her family members. She even goes to the hospital to meet her twin grandchildren but is confused about the fact that she is their grandmother. Alice finds that she can no longer answer the personal questions in her phone, stumbles upon the video she recorded for herself on her laptop, finds the pills, and is about to end it all when her caregiver comes in and robs her of her chance to follow through with taking the pills. Alice’s husband is offered a job at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota and decides to take it in order to avoid staying home and watching his wife deteriorate. Consequently, Alice’s daughter Lydia decides to move back home from California to care for her mom. The movie ends with Lydia reading an excerpt from a play and, when she is finished, asks her mom what she thinks the play was about. At this point in her diagnosis, Alice can hardly articulate words, but she is able to say “love”.

            I decided to watch Still Alice since it has been referenced many times during class this term and, also, because I do not have much learning experience with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s. Therefore, I am very eager to engage in learning opportunities associated with this topic. I think this movie is incredible in that it truly allows you to put yourself into Alice’s shoes and experience the progression of the memory impairment and loss that goes along with the diagnosis of Alzheimer’s. It also vividly illustrates the emotions and stresses that are experienced by family members of those diagnosed with this condition. I cannot imagine how I would react or cope with the fact that my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the young age of fifty and that I, too, tested positive for the gene. I believe that watching this movie furthered my learning of Alzheimer’s and other forms of cognitive impairment by providing insight of how an individual with Alzheimer’s and his/her family must adapt and change their mindset accordingly to the progression of the disease. Alice’s family members were living out their lives as they wished leading up to her diagnosis. However, after Alice was diagnosed and was becoming more and more limited in her physical and mental abilities, her husband coped by moving to another state to avoid watching her decline while Alice’s daughter wanted to move back home to care for her.

               Through watching Still Alice, I feel that I have gained a greater sense of empathy for individuals and family members affected by Alzheimer’s disease. Diagnoses such as Alzheimer’s lead to a great amount of emotional, physical, and mental stress for each family member involved. It is also incredibly tough on the individual who has been diagnosed since fear, confusion, anger, embarrassment, and depression are very commonly felt as a result of Alzheimer’s. Alice would know where she was some days, however she would also wake up some days in fear of where she was and what she was supposed to be doing. This movie illustrates the different stages of Alice’s memory decline and which symptoms are associated with each stage of progression, therefore I feel that it has enabled me to more easily identify these symptoms in a clinical setting when observing and evaluating future clients who may have cognitive impairments. While this movie does not have a cliché “happy ending,” I would highly recommend it to anyone in my class or anyone who is planning to work as a health professional in the future simply because it is a prime example of how this diagnosis can change the lives of clients and their families.

This movie is available to rent on Amazon and iTunes.

Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Still_Alice

Lutzus, L., Koffler, P., Brown, J. (Producers), & Westmoreland, W., Glatzer, R. (Directors). (2014). Still Alice [Motion picture]. United States: Killer Films.