{"id":1541,"date":"2018-05-31T10:29:14","date_gmt":"2018-05-31T09:29:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/?p=1541"},"modified":"2018-05-31T10:29:14","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T09:29:14","slug":"your-love-protects-me-the-pleasures-and-perils-of-caregiving","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2018\/05\/31\/your-love-protects-me-the-pleasures-and-perils-of-caregiving\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Your Love Protects Me&#8217;: The Pleasures and Perils of Caregiving"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Am<\/strong><strong>\u00e9rica, directed by Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, USA 2018<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Showing on Saturday and Sunday 9<sup>th<\/sup> and 10<sup>th<\/sup> June at <a href=\"https:\/\/sheffdocfest.com\/films\/6379\">Sheffield Doc Fest<\/a>, <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Am\u00e9rica TRAILER | Sheffield Doc\/Fest 2018\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/UMeOoOCidiE?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Toward the end of the arresting film, <em>Am<\/em><em>\u00e9rica,<\/em> a tour de force that depicts nearly every emotional high and low of caregiving, a frail, forgetful old abu\u00e9lita (grandma) asks the most devoted of her three grandsons, Diego, if there are people who &#8216;end up with nothing.&#8217; Diego responds that we all enter the world that way.\u00a0 Am\u00e9rica then completes the question by clarifying her meaning:\u00a0 &#8216;Alone, abandoned, with no one that loves you.&#8217;<\/p>\n<p>We learn at the beginning of the film that Am\u00e9rica\u2019s son, Luis, has been jailed for elder abuse and neglect; Am\u00e9rica had been found by neighbors, alone and bleeding after a fall.\u00a0 She is now moved to the house of a grandson, Rodrigo<strong>.<\/strong>\u00a0 A second grandson, Diego<strong>,<\/strong> quits his job as a surf instructor and rushes back to their Mexican hometown of Colima to help Rodrigo care for their grandmother while Luis is in prison.<\/p>\n<p>Diego, who has the lightest physique of the three grandsons of Am\u00e9rica, does the heavy lifting as both caregiver and day-laborer.\u00a0 Throughout the film, the greatest delight for the viewer is the manifest sincerity of Diego\u2019s affection for his frail grandmother, his genuine happiness in their brief moments of intimacy, elevating such everyday obligations as feeding, bathing, toileting, even manually extracting feces, to the level of paeans to filial love. \u00a0At one point, after Am\u00e9rica correctly recognizes from an old photo that Diego is her grandson, not her youngest son (as she otherwise insists), he rewards her with a smiling embrace, and she responds: &#8216;What a joy you are.\u00a0 You have so many memories of us.&#8217; And she is right; for Am\u00e9rica, Diego is the conservator of their joint memories. \u00a0When Diego performs a daredevil balancing act dangling from a tree, and America protests anxiously, he responds: &#8216;Your love protects me.&#8217; And he, too, is right; Diego and Am\u00e9rica are each sustained by their mutual affection.<\/p>\n<p>But Diego\u2019s brothers approach caregiving very differently.\u00a0 Rodrigo, the most robust physically of the three, believes that Am\u00e9rica has no grip on reality and &#8216;understands only basic instincts.&#8217; With his more intuitive understanding of dementia, Diego counters that Am\u00e9rica lives her own reality.\u00a0 There are conflicts with the third brother, Bruno, as well.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8216;\u00e9quippo,&#8217; the dream of a team of three athletic brothers united in their care for their beloved abu\u00e9lita, is now seriously threatened, illustrating the tensions that frequently erupt among siblings sharing caregiving responsibilities. \u00a0The camera repeatedly shows how some of the mangoes falling from a tree hit the ground split and bruised,\u00a0 suggesting in a single image both the fragility of Am\u00e9rica, who is constantly at risk of recurrent falls, as well as the threatened unity of the brothers.<\/p>\n<p>A clinical supervisor in my psychiatric residency once explained to me that the strong emotional reactions to patients that are recognized by the physician or therapist are not properly considered to be countertransference; instead, the term &#8216;countertransference&#8217; refers only to those reactions of which the therapist or physician is not consciously aware.<strong> \u00a0<\/strong>Moreover, he said, the most dangerous of all countertransference phenomena are one\u2019s poorly understood good intentions; and this caution applies equally to everyday life situations.\u00a0 Here, Bruno\u2019s good intentions are reflected in his zeal to help Am\u00e9rica regain her strength and walk independently, but he is oblivious to the fact the he is actually badgering and abusing her, let alone the reasons why he is behaving in this way. Concerned passers-by in the park who witness what Bruno is doing call the police. We have been shown another pitfall of caregiving, this time how the line between protection and abuse can easily be blurred, regardless of one\u2019s conscious motivations.<\/p>\n<p>Two of the grandsons, Diego and Bruno, are finally united in their determination to protect and support Am\u00e9rica, and to shield her from one of the most basic of human fears, the one that she has expressed herself, that of dying with &#8216;with no one that loves you.&#8217; By the film\u2019s end, the viewer, having witnessed the full gamut of the characters\u2019 caregiving experiences, feels uniquely empowered to reflect on the extent of their success.<!--TrendMD v2.4.8--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Am\u00e9rica, directed by Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside, USA 2018 Showing on Saturday and Sunday 9th and 10th June at Sheffield Doc Fest, Review by Professor Robert Abrams, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine, New York \u00a0 &nbsp; Toward the end of the arresting film, Am\u00e9rica, a tour de force that depicts nearly [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.bmj.com\/medical-humanities\/2018\/05\/31\/your-love-protects-me-the-pleasures-and-perils-of-caregiving\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":317,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.4 - 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