Psychological Disorders In Still Alice

Hollywood has always loved to show us unrealistic scenarios of people losing memories of their past or losing the ability to make new memories. Most people watch those films blissfully unaware that real people struggle to learn the “art of losing” pieces of their life (Bishop, 1992). Still Alice is a film about a fictional character and her family having to learn to how to lose a member of their family. In Still Alice, Alice is a highly successful Professor of Linguistic in the University of Columbia who get diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. The film begins with Alice celebrating her 50th birthday with her beautiful and successful family. In this scene, we are shown the very first symptoms of her condition. Next, we are shown how Alice

Alice condition worsens and she is unable to give coherent lectures so she loses her job. John, Alice’s husband, gets offered a job with the Mayo clinic and Alice ask him whether he could take a year off. Then, Alice goes to an Alzheimer’s conference where she gives a speech about her experience with living with Alzheimer’s. During the speech, she used a highlighter to prevent herself from reading the same sentence. Meanwhile, Alice condition continues to worsen. After a video phone call with Lydia, Alice finds the video of herself explaining how to kill herself, however, the caregiver returns home preventing Alice from killing herself. As Alice continues to deteriorate John is unable to care for her so he moves to Minnesota. So, Lydia comes back from Los Angeles to care for her mother. Although this film is mostly about the devastating effects Alzheimer’s has on a person and their family, it also manages to portray some psychological phenomena. Still Alice shows its audience how certain aspects of our consciousness are cognitively impenetrable and we are only able to control a small part of our mental