We collected testimonies from people who suffer from depression, anxiety and Alzheimer as well as doing a film review of the movie 'Split' about its representation of several mental illnesses (more specifically DID), in order to get a more personal view of these diorders.

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Depression

"In January of 1999, when I was 23, the life I knew ceased to exist.  

My father emigrated to Switzerland to work because the circumstances demanded it.  I remember waiting for my father at the beginning of December and in the summer, when he came home. We wrote letters and cards, sent pictures, told each other everything that was going on, and spoke on the phone. We spent our birthdays apart, my mother, my sister and I in Portugal and my father there. He celebrated his and our anniversaries with his co-workers, and I can’t remember spending those days with the entire family. When my father returned to Switzerland, I never took him to the airport. It was too hard for me, I cried a lot, and I barely managed to say goodbye to him because it seemed like it was forever. It felt so good when I saw him pass through the doors as he arrived in Portugal, and I hugged him. I still feel his hug and his smell.  

In early January, I worked as a secretary in a company in Sintra, and I came home to lunch every day. On one of those days, my mother wasn't home, and I found it odd, so I called her, but she didn't respond. Then, I called my aunt, and she told me that my mother had gone to take care of her passport and set up a trip to Switzerland. I was confused, although, at the same time, everything made sense to me. I was already suspicious because there were phone calls with the door closed, but my mother didn't want to worry us and, for this reason, she didn’t tell us anything. When my mother was with my father in Switzerland, she told us what was happening. My father had bowel cancer. He was hospitalized and went through a few surgeries. In a few of them his heart stopped, some went well and others not so great. There were moments of hope.  

At the end of February, they came back to Portugal in an ambulance plane. I didn't wait for him at the airport as I did the other times but when they arrived home, I hugged him, and I disguised the way I was feeling so my dad wouldn’t be sadder. He didn't seem like my father. He was thin, pale and quiet. I was devasted, and I left home to cry and yell without anyone hearing. 

They brought a letter from the doctor, which explained every procedure my dad went through and revealed that it wasn't worth it doing chemotherapy since there was no point. He was just going to suffer more, because the cancer had spread to his whole body quickly. They gave my father three months to live.  

In the middle of it all, I was going to get married on the 5th of September of that year. I wanted to anticipate the data, and I also wanted to give up, but my father didn't allow me. He told me not to change anything and that my uncle/godfather (his brother) would walk me down the aisle. Time passed by, and I chose my wedding dress with my aunt because my mother had to be at home to take care of my father. Sometimes I had to leave work earlier because my father wanted to talk to me. He was worried about us since not only I was going to get married but my sister as well, a year later, and my mother would be alone at home.  

My father had to go to the hospital a few times and, at home, he had medical assistance from his doctor and the firemen. He ended up getting oxygen and morphine. At 4:30 am, on 27th May, I couldn't sleep, so I got up, and it was when I saw my aunt leaving my parents room with the basin that had the tubes of oxygen. At that moment, I realized I had lost my father forever. I thought about why my father when there are so many bad people in the world. I got angry with God. 

From that day on, I put myself in a bubble of my own and didn't let anyone in. When the phone rang, I always thought it was my father calling us. I thought that at any moment he would ring the bell and enter the house, and I also thought he was still in Switzerland. For 19 years, I never accepted what happened. I became terribly afraid of losing my mother and later my children. I, who had few fears, from that moment on whenever I needed to travel, I could only relax when I arrived at the destination. 

I got married, and the next day, I went to put my bouquet on my father's grave. I don't remember my wedding day. I only know how it went thanks to the pictures and my wedding video. I went on a honeymoon, came back, kept working and talking with other people like everything was fine. However, I stopped tidying the house, cooking, giving attention to my husband, and I exploded, screamed and cried, for anything. 

I got pregnant and I lost my job because I had to stay at home. During the pregnancy, I was hospitalized because of my vesicle, and I almost lost my daughter. She was born out of the irony of destiny in May of 2003. The delivery went well and was a cesarean.  

For 19 years I went through several psychiatrists, psychologists, different medicines, acupuncture and massages. I did everything, but there was no result. I was diagnosed with bipolar depression. 

I gained a lot of weight during these years, I went from 70Kg to 125Kg. In 2009, I was operated on for bariatric surgery. I only lost 20Kg, because I don't get fat from what I eat, but because I'm always nervous and stressed.  

At that time, I was an administrative receptionist at a printing shop and my desk was facing the cemetery, where my father was. It wasn't strange for me to look at the cemetery, and now I realized that I felt accompanied by him every day when I looked at the window. It was at that time that I stopped taking medication, because my colleagues were exceptional with me, very funny, and they could always cheer me up. I thought I was fine.  

In December of 2010, my son was born. The pregnancy went well and it was a natural birth. My mood was still the same, and I regretted it a lot, especially when I shouted at my children. I cried a lot when I realized how I spoke or scolded them.  

At end of 2015, the printing company went bankrupt, and I was very sad and cried a lot, but, at the same time, I knew I was coming home to take care of my precious asset, my children. I got worse. I was even sadder, I thought I saw my father in the street, I cried a lot, I couldn't sleep, I was impatience and demotivated. However, I was always available for my children.  

In 2017, I decided to go to see another doctor, and I was attended by Dr Filipe Gonçalves. He is younger than me, and his hair is full of curls and tousled. The doctor is very kind, funny, patient, and a good listener. I told him everything about my life since 1999, cried, laughed, and regretted it. He disagreed that I had bipolar depression and gave me another medication. I left there feeling lighter. I went to my mother's house to go get my children, and I told her how the appointment was. She told me that the doctor did something good since I was laughing, and genuinely happy. Since that day, I have been accompanied by the same doctor and he got the medication right, which is only one pill a day.  

Until today, I discovered several things about myself. The main one was that before 1999, I thought that my life, my home, and my family were eternal and that I lived in a pink world in a cloud of cotton candy. My father was so cheerful, funny and always ready to play as the four of us were, and he wouldn't want me to be unhappy and destroying myself. I realized that I had to change and thankfully with the help of the doctor I am managing. 

I finished catechesis, asking for forgiveness, made peace with God and was confirmed. It was very important to me. 

I am grateful to my mom who is always here for me. I am grateful to my husband because if he was someone else, he would have left in the first year of marriage. I thank my children, without them I don't know if today I will be giving my testimony since I thought about giving up. I thank my doctor Filipe, and God, who never abandoned me.  

  

I apologize to everyone who I made suffer. 

Father, Mother, Sister, Children, Husband."

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Anxiety

"I've been dealing with anxiety for two years, but it has probably been longer. It's hard to place a beginning and an end. Where does a healthy mind stop and a disorder begins? This type of things doesn't happen out of nowhere: they crawl slowly and eat you up. It sure happened like that for me.  

Since a young age I've been known as someone who could be considered to "easily freak out". When I was in 5th grade, I lost the keys to my house and after that every time I looked for them in my school backpack, if they weren't in the place, I originally thought, I would just hyperventilate in front of my class.  

But that was not anxiety. That was feeling anxious. 

And between a feeling and a disease come a thousand more hours, three hundred more times the pain and 100% more stigma.  

I was diagnosed with anxiety almost 2 years ago. It was somewhere in April but it truly felt like my life was slowly deteriorating a couple of weeks before that. I decided to seek for help when it started affecting my life, more specifically my academic life. I would take tests and I wouldn't be able to read the questions: for example, let's assume the exercise would ask "What's your name?". I would know that "What" was used for questions, “your” was something that was mine and that "name" is the word given to designate something. But as a whole sentence, I wouldn't know it's meaning. It was something that often frustrated me because I would study hard and I just knew that what I was reading I had already read somewhere before but my mind couldn't place the words together, they didn't make sense. I would spend most of the times that I had to solve the tests freaking out about not being able to read and the outcome was never positive.  

I thought I needed help. I asked my parents if I could start seeing a therapist and thankfully, they listened to my concerns and scheduled an appointment. For that I felt really grateful not only because I know so many people who asked for the same help and weren’t able to receive it, but also because looking back now I was in a situation that was hard to understand, I had all the motives to be a happy person: I had a family that loved me, probably too many friends, good grades, I was a nice person, no one was bullying me / putting me in a position of danger, I think it might be hard to understand. But they still supported it and went with me to my first appointment.  

I can still remember the way me and my mom sat on the chairs, my dad stayed standing. My therapist started to ask me a couple of standard questions and gave my parents some advice (that they followed religiously). After my parents left, the appointment began and for the next few weeks and months that event would repeat itself very often (except when I had relapses and independently decided that I no longer need therapy). 

For me it's as easy to know anxiety as it is to look at my left hand and count five fingers. However, every single time I try to describe what it feels like to have it, I feel like there's something missing. Some element that only if you have it you can know. I think it's fear. Because anxiety is based on fears, it's born from them so imagine living your daily life carrying the feeling of facing your biggest fear to everywhere you go, and imagine how that would change the way you feel and act in that environment. 

Anxiety is a mist of feelings. It's being constantly conditioned by my mental state and above all, relinquishing plenty of things. 

For me it's fearing the possibility of being alone with someone because "Oh God what if we ran out of things to say?” or “What if this person doesn't actually want to be here with me” or even the typical “What if they think I’m annoying or boring?”. It's giving up of all plans and ideas that could somehow bring me some personal fulfilment since I’m obviously not enough. It's spending classes holding my heart in my throat, afraid that a teacher would ask me to participate in class, not because I wouldn't know the answer but for the horrid fear of making a mistake (it's as if I know that two plus two is four, but then I start wondering, what if it's actually three? or five? what if everyone in this room was warned that two plus two equals three and I was the only one that didn't get the memo?).It's spending nights without sleeping because my mind can't rest or because out of nowhere my whole body starts shaking like an earthquake is happening or I simply stop breathing and it seems like there's no air in my own room (and I don't have breathing problems), and it doesn't mean I'm not tired, it doesn't mean that my whole body isn't exhausted, it's just that I can't stop it. It's having panic attacks in the worst situations and not being able to control them (and feeling bad for being vulnerable in from of people). It's thinking that everyone is judging me, at all times. It's being unable of making future plans because of the fear that comes of possibly not achieving them. It's constantly apologizing for things for example, someone hurts me and I think I have to apologize for the fact that the person thought they should hurt me. It's being afraid of talking with people at services (I didn't used to be able to ask for my own coffee).  

But I think that what hurts the most it's giving up plans, losing opportunities, leaving many things midway and not being able to have a normal discussion (because I fear that my arguments aren't good enough) 

With anxiety you want to run. You want to do the marathon if it means the feeling will go away. There is a constant need of escaping from the factors that are suffocating you. In my case, I felt an irrational fear of the future, of having my life slowly but constantly changing. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was missing out everything, that I wasn’t accompanying it, my present quickly shifted into past because I couldn’t enjoy it since I was too busy obsessing and suffering for something that never comes, tomorrow.  

Besides that, with therapy, I was able to go to the core of things, to understand myself better, to understand better the factors that were affecting me. Even though I’ve made peace with most of the things that tormented me, life is always changing and therefore, so are they. Now I no longer fear the future as I used to, but I’ve developed other irrational fears that seem ridiculous when put in perspective. It’s interesting, I think, that I can objectively see that so many things aren’t the way my mind paints them most of the time, but I can’t in any way control the influence they have over me. 

With this disorder I learned that several small victories make a bigger one. So probably from an outside point of view there hasn’t been any major difference, I’m still really far from being ‘treated’, but for now, I feel ok, I think I’ve done much progress and I can’t wait to see who I’ll be able to become once I get further down the line of becoming myself and less of a reflection of a medical diagnostic."

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Alzheimer

With my father’s death in 1990, my mother, then 53, began presenting a depressive state and started being medicated. I think this may be the origin of what was going to be diagnosed 9 years later (Alzheimer's dementia). 

Because of the fact that my mother is illiterate, from an early age I had to take on the responsibilities of the house since we lived only with each other. Around 1998/1999, shortly after my 24th birthday, I verified that my mother was presenting frequent forgetfulness (loss of wallet, doubts of door locks, among others...). This led me to consult the family doctor who asked for an electroencephalogram, which came to confirm, “chronic ischaemic leukoencephalopathy, to a degree quite advanced for the age group", in the clinic information was written “Alzheimer’s Disease”. 

From here began our long walk that lasts to this day... 

After the diagnosis, we were referred for psychiatric consultations with Dr. Manuel Guerreiro, who accompanied us for some time, and came to add to the medication of depression, the medication for dementia. Consultations with Dr. Manuel Guerreiro have become a routine in our lives. 

Until there, life was passing by more or less in a normal way, as long as the routines were the same. She continued serving in people's houses and washing stairs in condominiums to ensure sustenance. In the houses she served (in Lisbon), she was accompanied by her sister, otherwise, she could hardly guide herself in space. 

By this time, the future son-in-law enters our lives. We started living all together and my mother stopped working. At home, she started doing routine chores. She took care of the house and we helped on the weekends. Despite all the difficulties, controlled, she could do her chores and still allowed us to leave the house without major worries. 

In 2003 entered in our lives the first granddaughter, author of this work, who came bringing new light to our routine. The connection between all was immediate, but the grandmother never wanted to take any responsibility in the care to be taken with the child. Here you could see the lack of confidence and the fear of failing the tasks. 

With few ups and too many lows, during the following years, life became very routine in order to not affect the anemic state of my mother, who began to react negatively to the changes. 

Around 2008, the state of the disease aggravated, and we had to resort to a day center to keep my mother busy and guarded during the period we were away for work. Depression led to systematic and excessive concerns and to isolation. Going to the institution wasn’t accepted easily because she thought that she was being abandoned, but over time this concern disappeared. 

It started being necessary to ensure that hygiene was well done, the take of medications had to be ensured equally, as well as a follow-up to dress. The continuous degradation of dementia was visible. 

In that same term (2010), the second granddaughter was born, and life to me began a calvary. Taking care of two children and an adult, became part of our (mine and my husband’s) daily routine. The doctor's visits multiplied. 

By this time, difficulties with locomotion appeared. Doing short walks had already become a torment and our family life was degrading. 

A lot of anxiety accompanied by vomiting, many urinary infections, the appearance of other pathologies, such as suspected vertiginous syndrome, hypertension, accompanied by chronic gastritis, became part of our daily lexicon. If it wasn't one thing, it was another! 

In 2014 a new CT scan confirms the worsening of the situation. 

By that time many mood swings arose, and we had to resort to a neurologist who had to make a change to the medication. 

Granddaughter’s birthdays, walks, holidays, weekends, were already complicated, they became even more complicated. 

With the desperation increasing, we resorted to supporting lines – Alzheimer's line that helped little. At most, what you could get was paid training! 

Between 2017 and 2019, so we could have a few moments of rest, we had to resort to the figure of the rest of the caregiver to find some time that would allow us to recharge batteries for the following year.   

In 2020, already after 5 months confined, with nerves bursting at the seams, we managed to get her into a retirement home, where she stays to this day, where we visit, with the regularity that the times we live allow us to. 

We know that each story is a story and, in these cases, there are stories shorter than others. 

This one has about 21 years and reveals one of the biggest loves of our lives. The mother’s love! 

I believe that this summary allows who’s reading or listening to this testimony to be aware of what was more or less the routine of this family during this curse, what was lived and what remained to live. It also allows realizing the difficulties that the absences of state support violate those who have to endure these challenges and allows above all to perceive the feelings that pierce us and the choices that we have to make to maintain the physical, mental and emotional balance! The choices wasn’t/aren't easy but the love supports everything! 

Thank you to my husband and daughters for all that has helped me during these long and difficult years...

 

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Dissociative Disorders

Split is a psychological thriller focused on a man with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) who kidnaps three young women, as well as the attempts to escape by the three girls. This man initially presents 23 different alters (the system), however later in the movie we discover a 24th alter. 

This movie, along with almost all representation of DID on media, perpetuates harmful and incorrect stereotypes, which can have a big impact on how our society reacts to this disorder. Thus, the point of this review will be to educate and to criticize this misrepresentation, from a scientific point of view. 

From the beginning of the movie, we can observe the inaccurate portrayal of the system as a whole, for example the alters seem to only be able to communicate outside the headspace, not showing the existence of an inner monologue, which is usually how alters communicate with each other; they mention (multiple times) that Barry, the host of the system, can choose who “takes the light” (who is conscious or “fronting”), which is simply not how it works; only one of the alters, Dennis, their protector, has OCD, which is a neurological disorder, not psychological, therefore it’s inconsistent that other alters don’t present such characteristic; and finally Hedwig, their little (a child alter), is used only as comic relief, ignoring his importance in the system.  

Another big issue was the psychiatrist and the way she dealt with the system. Not only was she incredible unprofessional, especially towards the “evil” alters, and crossed professional boundaries various times, such as showing up to a patient’s house uninvited and disclosing her patient’s private personal and medical information with her colleagues, but she also treated DID as a medical marvel and patients as if they were superhuman. 

On the other hand, the representation of PTSD and childhood trauma in the character Casey is the most accurate portrayal of mental illnesses in the movie. She showed accurate trauma responses to experiencing a similar traumatic event, as well as helping another character getting out of possibly being sexually assaulted, something only a person who has been in that position would know how to do. Additionally, the little we know about Casey’s behaviour at school is consistent with the behaviour of a person who is struggling with both PTSD and childhood trauma. 

Without a doubt, the worst characterization in this movie is the main character, because of its portrayal of people with mental disorders as perpetrators of violent crimes, when statistics show that people who are crippled by mental illnesses, childhood trauma and dissociative disorders are more likely to become a victim of another violent offense rather than become a violent offender themselves. On top of that, Dennis, an alter and one of the main characters, is shown to be a pedophile, contributing to the villanization of mental disorders. 

In conclusion, this film not only misrepresents DID, as a “superpower” and a danger to society, but also many other disorders, including OCD and anxiety, supporting the stigmatization of mental illnesses. Furthermore, since the general population is not familiarized with this disorders, their incorrect and damaging portrayal has a big influence on how these disorders are received by people, therefore the accurate representation of said illnesses on media is very important.