He Wants to Itch at It: A Novel, Play, and Movie Imagining Dementia
10/27/23 • 54 min
What could it be like to have dementia? We can’t know. But the arts can imagine what people with dementia could be going through, and many works have been produced for that purpose. We feature a literary novel (The Wilderness), and a play (The Father) and its movie adaptation, offering sophisticated renderings of dementia for consideration. In the course of our conversation about these works and how they imagine dementia, we include: how an illusionist was part of the creative team in The Father to produce a sense of disorientation among audience members; how the metaphor of “the wilderness” is used in the novel and more broadly in various texts from the beginning of civilization; and how well the psalm used in the novel worked and builds on the place of psalms as texts for understanding how people react when threatened by significant life events.
Featured Content Sources:
- The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, Anchor Books, 2009.
- The Father (play), Florian Zeller playwright, Doug Hughes director, Christopher Hampton translator, NYC Broadway 2016 + tour sites, London West End 2015 + tour sites.
- The Father (movie), Florian Zeller screenwriter and director, Christopher Hampton translator, Trademark Films, release date US – 2/26/21, available through many streaming services.
Links:
Russell Teagarden’s associated blog pieces at According to the Arts:
- The Wilderness: the novel and literary excerpts compared with biomedical text
- The Father: the play and the movie
Russell Teagarden’s review of The Father (movie) in the journal, The Pharos.
Podcast episode 6, which features dementia related to Parkinson’s disease and expressed through the poetry (sonnets) of Micheal O’Siadhail is here.
Background information on development of Alzheimer’s disease as an obscure and rare disease to a broad categorization of dementia:
- Patrick Fox. From Senility to Alzheimer's Disease: The Rise of the Alzheimer's Disease Movement. The Milbank Quarterly 1989; 67:58-102.
- Claudia Chaufan, Brooke Hollister, Jennifer Nazareno, Patrick Fox. Medical ideology as a double-edged sword: The politics of cure and care in the making of Alzheimer’s disease. Soc Sci Med 2012;74:788-795.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
What could it be like to have dementia? We can’t know. But the arts can imagine what people with dementia could be going through, and many works have been produced for that purpose. We feature a literary novel (The Wilderness), and a play (The Father) and its movie adaptation, offering sophisticated renderings of dementia for consideration. In the course of our conversation about these works and how they imagine dementia, we include: how an illusionist was part of the creative team in The Father to produce a sense of disorientation among audience members; how the metaphor of “the wilderness” is used in the novel and more broadly in various texts from the beginning of civilization; and how well the psalm used in the novel worked and builds on the place of psalms as texts for understanding how people react when threatened by significant life events.
Featured Content Sources:
- The Wilderness, by Samantha Harvey, Anchor Books, 2009.
- The Father (play), Florian Zeller playwright, Doug Hughes director, Christopher Hampton translator, NYC Broadway 2016 + tour sites, London West End 2015 + tour sites.
- The Father (movie), Florian Zeller screenwriter and director, Christopher Hampton translator, Trademark Films, release date US – 2/26/21, available through many streaming services.
Links:
Russell Teagarden’s associated blog pieces at According to the Arts:
- The Wilderness: the novel and literary excerpts compared with biomedical text
- The Father: the play and the movie
Russell Teagarden’s review of The Father (movie) in the journal, The Pharos.
Podcast episode 6, which features dementia related to Parkinson’s disease and expressed through the poetry (sonnets) of Micheal O’Siadhail is here.
Background information on development of Alzheimer’s disease as an obscure and rare disease to a broad categorization of dementia:
- Patrick Fox. From Senility to Alzheimer's Disease: The Rise of the Alzheimer's Disease Movement. The Milbank Quarterly 1989; 67:58-102.
- Claudia Chaufan, Brooke Hollister, Jennifer Nazareno, Patrick Fox. Medical ideology as a double-edged sword: The politics of cure and care in the making of Alzheimer’s disease. Soc Sci Med 2012;74:788-795.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
Previous Episode
When Neurons Get Tied Up in Knots: Human Fallibility and Folly in Asylum Psychiatry
We look to three sources, a movie (The Mountain), a documentary film (The Lobotomist), and a nonfiction book (Desperate Remedies), for perspectives on human fallibility and folly in American asylum psychiatry during the first half of the 20th century. We focus in particular on the consequences of the overconfidence asylum psychiatry exhibited, the problem of medical knowledge in play, and the vulnerability of affected people from an absence of agency. These sources pointed to lobotomies, dental extractions, abdominal eviscerations, insulin comas, and other like illustrative interventions as case studies of what were once hailed as best medical practices that became horrors later. Recognizing that human fallibility and folly are an unchangeable feature of the human condition, we muse about whether we are any less exposed to such horrors today and forever.
Content Sources:
The Mountain – writer / director Rick Alverson, Vice Studios, 2018.
The Lobotomist – writer Barak Goodman, producers and directors Barak Goodman and John Maggio / American Experience (PBS) /available online at Vimeo, 2008.
Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness – author Andrew Scull / Belknap, 2022.
Audio clips from the documentary film, The Lobotomist, credits here.
Links:
Russell Teagarden’s blog pieces at According to the Arts on The Mountain and Desperate Remedies.
Other related blog pieces at According to the Arts:
Civilization and Madness: A History of Madness in the Age of Reason, Michel Foucault
Birth of the Clinic: An Archeology of Medical Perception , Michel Foucault
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, Maggie O’Farrell
The Lobotomist is available online at Vimeo.
Francisco Goya’s painting referenced in the episode, The Madhouse.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
Next Episode
Reconciliation and Denial: Two Elements of Family Dementia Stories
The millions of families dealing with Alzheimer’s disease produce millions of their own stories. We focus on two particular elements that can be part of a family’s story about dementia. One, from a collection of autobiographical stories, centers on an adult daughter with a long-standing, and justifiable antipathy towards her mother, who nevertheless finds a way to aid her when dementia takes hold. And, while doing so, she finds a new relationship with her mother and takes delight in the personality dementia produces for a time. The other, drawn from a novel, centers on various forms of denial a wife exhibits over several years of her husband’s dementia progression.
Featured Content Sources:
Stories from, The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, 2014
Novel, We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas, Simon & Shuster, 2014
Links:
From Russell Teagarden’s blog, According to the Arts:
- The Faraway Nearby, by Rebecca Solnit: the book; comparison of excerpts with biomedical text
- We Are Not Ourselves, by Matthew Thomas
Thanks to Alexis Teagarden, PhD, for bringing Rebecca Solnit’s, The Faraway Nearby, to our attention.
Please send us comments, recommendations, and questions to: [email protected].
Thanks for listening, and please subscribe to The Clinic & The Person wherever you get your podcasts, or visit our website.
Executive producer: Anne Bentley
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