The movie starts with a close up of Christine Lucas’s bloodshot eye, a woman who wakes up every morning and doesn't recognise her own bedroom, the guy in the bed next to her, or even her own 40-year-old face. This is because she has atypical psychogenic amnesia, which means she has struggled to remember anything that has transpired in the 13 years after her catastrophic head trauma. She can remember the events of a day until she falls asleep, but the slate is wiped clean again after a night. Therefore, through this blog, I aim to analyse the representation of Christine’s condition in the movie and its related aspects like treatment and memory retrieval and their accuracy as per psychological standard practices.  The guy in the bed discloses that he is her husband Ben, and that she suffered an accident that caused her amnesia, with a tired patience that implies he's recounted the scenario many times before. When Ben leaves for work, Christine's phone rings, and a guy who i...

 Rwiti Bhattacharya On a random Tuesday in 2016, the famed boxer - Muhammad Ali’s wife took him to the hospital for a cough, they were given some medication and they returned home. When that didn’t help and his condition worsened, he decided to visit the hospital again. However, within the next 24 hours, his condition steadily deteriorated and all his organs started to shut down. After a point, he had to be put on the ventilator and a decision had to be made - Ali chose to die a painless death rather than live a life of possible paralysis (CBS News, 2016). This paper will try to explore and explain the causes surrounding Muhammad Ali’s death and how his illustrious boxing career might have unknowingly paved the way for a crippling disorder.  Muhammad Ali and the people around him first began to notice patterns of awkward motor movement and postural instability in the years following his retirement, in 1981. He had all the major symptoms of Parkinson’s disorder - muscle stiffne...

Arihant Hemendra      Association football or soccer is hands down the most popular sport in the world, with an estimated 250 million players kicking the football about on some skill level or the other across the world ( All You Need to Know About Soccer | World Football FAQ , 2020). The rules of the sport are such that players make contact with not just the ball but also each other using some or the other parts of their bodies. While almost every sport brings about its fair share of related injuries, football sometimes wreaks devastating injuries on its players. This blog post seeks to analyse brain injuries caused by or while playing football. Of course, with every sport bringing about its fair share of injuries, soccer is no stranger to this. Take, for example, Petr Cech’s horrific skull fracture in 2006, or Iain Hume’s freak injury in 2008 which involved broken pieces of his skull piercing his brain and causing internal bleeding. However new research suggests that ...

 Yashvi Jain ‘Still Alice’ is a heartfelt film which highlights Dr Alice Howland’s arduous struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, and sheds light on the harsh reality of its physical, mental and emotional effects. In order to dramatise a film and keep it in sync with the current trends, directors often tend to sacrifice scientific accuracy. This makes it crucial to scrutinise the film and discern its authenticity. In this blog post, I aim to unravel the intricacies of Alzheimer’s disease in ‘Still Alice’ and evaluate its accuracy, or lack thereof.   Alzheimer’s disease falls under the purview of dementia and is the most common type of neurocognitive disorder. It is “a progressive neurodegenerative disease characterised by cortical atrophy, neuronal death, synapse loss, and accumulation of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, causing dementia and a significant decline in functioning” ( American Psychological Association, 2022 ). Only approximately 5-6% of individuals s...

 Geetika Sharma  For elderly people with Dementia and Alzheimer's, the chances of abuse are much higher than their elderly counterparts without these disorders (Dong et al., 2014). Due to them often being in a state of confusion or maybe even anger, caregivers or caretakers of people with neurocognitive disorders tend to ‘lash out’ or mistreat patients either out of frustration or the awareness of a lack of accountability as abuse is harder to detect in the cases of patients with conditions such as Dementia and Alzheimer’s (Cooper et al., 2009). It is a rather commonly known fact that people with neurocognitive disorders such as Alzheimer's and Dementia often face abuse at the hand of their caretakers. However, living without such a caretaker does not lessen the chances of abuse occurring, as self-neglect or not being able to take care of one’s own self in terms of daily life activities such as bathing or cooking can also be recognised as a form of abuse (Papaioannou et al., 2...

Shubhi Pal Parkinson’s disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that is the second highest in prevalence after Alzheimer’s disease. Typical features of the disease include motor symptoms, such as ‘resting tremors’ and ‘rigidity in movements’ (Butcher et al., 2021). It is also characterized by ‘non-motor symptoms’ including psychological symptoms such as anxiety, depression, sleep dysfunction, and cognitive deficits, some of which manifest years before the motor symptoms become apparent (Butcher et al., 2021; Mappin-Kasirer et al., 2020). In a 1968 study, a group of researchers noted a surprising observation: there was lower prevalence of Parkinson’s disease among smokers than non-smokers (Nefzger et al., 1968, as cited in Gale & Martyn, 2003). Similar observations have been made for coffee-drinkers. These findings have been confirmed by numerous epidemiological studies, as demonstrated by Hernán et al. (2002) in their systematic review and meta-analysis of such studies (...