Symptoms Of Alzheimer's In The Movie, Still Alice

The movie Still Alice displays how Alice Howland’s daily life gets interrupted as she is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s. Her and her family must learn to cope with the disease and overcome the heartbreaking hurtles they are faced with. Alice is a 50-year-old Caucasian female who is a linguistics professor at Columbia University. She is married and a mother to two girls and one boy. The onset of symptoms started when Alice was 50-years-old and began with forgetting little things like words and names, that Alice did not find concerning at first, and then she got lost running around campus. Alice portrays symptoms that are maladaptive such as loss of words, getting lost while running around a familiar campus, repeating questions minutes apart, and not being able to find the bathroom in her own home. She loses words such as “lexicon” and can not seem to find them. When she can not find the bathroom in her own house, she is forced to pee her pants because she has no other options besides the washroom she cannot …show more content…
The entertainment of the movie did not compromise the symptoms of the disorder, but it did exaggerate certain symptoms to make sure the disorder was obvious to the viewers. For example, the second symptom portrayed in the movie was Alice completely forgetting where she was as she was running around campus, however, this would have been a very strong and rare first symptom of the disorder. The movie did not portray the disorder in a positive view, nor did it portray the disorder in a negative view. The movie displayed the disorder as a difficult, sad struggle of Alice and her family and also mentioned how she felt ashamed of it. The movie did not show anything that would make the individuals with the disorder be viewed in a negative way, however it did showed that the disorder can effect individuals as young as