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The Glamorisation of Dementia in the Media

The Story of Nan Nisbet

By Grace LynchPublished 6 years ago 4 min read
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My sister (Emily), my cousin (Christoper), my Gran (Nan), my Grandad (George), my cousin (Jennifer) and myself. 2013

In the UK over 850,000 people are living with dementia and it's estimated at this point that one in three people will develop it over the years. In the U.S it's estimated that around 5.3 million people are living with this disease. With the recent interest in bringing attention to this disease, many media portrayals of dementia have caught people's attention.

Grey's Anatomy was possibly the first time I saw a character with dementia on screen, I was around nine years old. The protagonist of the show Meredith Grey's successful surgeon mother Ellis Grey has dementia and we see many accurate symptoms from her including mood swings, forgetting her own daughter, and aggression. Her situation was seen as 'advanced' and at the time it seemed heartbreaking to me. In later seasons we see Adele Webber develop the same disease and suffer similar symptoms. She has a few falls, often forgetting how they happened before she is diagnosed with dementia and we see her forget who her husband is. Both characters in Grey's Anatomy tragically die.

In 2014, the film Still Alice was released starring Julianne Moore as a professor who is diagnosed with early onset dementia. Alice forgets words during lectures, gets lost on jogs, and we see her leaving videos instructing herself to take her medication. Still Alice is a wonderful film that explores what dementia must be like for the people suffering from it.

I could only have been 12 when my gran was diagnosed with dementia and at the time I didn't really understand. I remembered the characters from Grey's Anatomy and thought to myself, so she won't remember me. So she won't be able to go out by herself. At least we'll still have her. However, I realised in the past few years that these shows didn't depict dementia at it's worst. They glamorised it, they showed audiences a better version of this disease, because my gran was nothing like these characters.

Let me paint you a picture of my gran before dementia. She was incredible. She helped raise all four of her grandchildren. She and my grandad would look after us every Saturday night. My gran loved to bake but couldn't cook to save herself, she was kind but scary when angry and her favourite line was, "You're never too old for a clout."

It started off the same way. My gran would forget to meet my grandad after swimming, she began to mix up all of our names, and she took a couple of falls. Before she was officially diagnosed we would laugh. We would laugh when she called me Emily instead of Grace. We would laugh when she forgot a mundane word. We would laugh when she told us the story of Chookles the dog over and over again. We would say "Gran you've already told us that story," and she would reply "Have I?" My parents explained to my sister and I that my gran's memories of us would begin to fade and to let her tell the stories of her childhood repeatedly.

At first, I thought, and we all thought, that those characters on TV and the people you see on the news were the worst it got. But they weren't accurate, in fact, they were what I like to refer to as best case scenario because my gran can no longer walk. My gran can no longer talk, instead, she yells incoherently. She doesn't recognise who we are, she is incontinent, and she has to be spoonfed. My gran is a shell of the person she once was. That vibrant, unapologetic woman who made me jelly and ice cream and would chase my mum around the house with a broom is gone. Occasionally, my gran will wink at me and I think to myself, 'She's still in there.' But I honestly don't know if she is, I don't know what it's like in her head or what she sees when she looks at me. I do know that it breaks my heart when I look at her lying in a bed in my grandparents' living room, crying because she doesn't know who she is.

These media portrayals are trying and I understand that, but they are presenting the best case scenario. I have never, not even on the news, seen a case of dementia as bad as my gran's. And maybe she is one of the worst cases out there, maybe there are few with this type of dementia. However, my family set ourselves up for that best case scenario and found that my gran went far beyond it. We need to see more of the worst case scenario, so that people understand that there's more to dementia than loss of memory and mood swings.

My gran is still fighting. My grandad, who is the strongest person I know, is still taking care of her. My mum and auntie feed her every night. My sister, cousins, and I take turns sitting with her and listening to music because it's the only thing that she responds to. We have carers who come in three times a day to bathe, change, and move her from her bed to her chair. Taking care of my gran is practically a military operation, and that is never shown in the media.

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About the Creator

Grace Lynch

A film and media student with a love of travel and all things Disney.

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