Their loss, net to the total loss of self (i.e., death), is the most frightening specter confronting human beings’. The brain, the mind, the spirit, and the will (and we need not make obviously important distinctions here), which constitute the central locus of humanity, are affected. The condition, according to physician Robert N Butler, ‘seriously jeopardizes the faculties we ordinarily define as uniquely human: memory, personality, recognition, awareness, the capacity to love, even a sense of hope. Still, Alzheimer’s patients would not write.įrom a wider cultural perspective, Alzheimer’s has come to signify the ‘death of the self’… Also, patients usually have five to ten years between diagnosis and death, and, at the time of clinically perceivable onset, can continue to articulate themselves proficiently in writing, as well as retaining figurative language. I was astonished that there were so few, especially because I felt that the popular press had long preferred Alzheimer’s disease to any other subject in its health and wellbeing pages. At the time, I found only just over a dozen of books published in English, and one diary in French. I began looking for patient accounts about a decade ago.

Still, Alzheimer’s patients would not write… The methodologies, models and approaches I used were unsuited to answering this question. While pursuing, and later supervising, laboratory based experimental projects, I more and more often wondered how patients actually experience the condition which I only knew from studies in cell culture and other disease models. For over 15 years, my research interests have been the molecular mechanisms that cause the death of brain cells in conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.

I am a pharmaceutical scientist by training who specialised in neuropharmacology. By Martina Zimmermann, honorary Associate Professor in Pharmacology at Goethe University Frankfurt, with an MA in Literature and Medicine and a second PhD in Health Humanities at King’s College London.

Losing my mind by thomas debaggio