Documentary on Alzheimer’s patients touches a chord in Modesto

Vivid reactions of dementia patients to hearing their favorite tunes touched hearts and brought tears at a benefit screening of the documentary “Alive Inside” at the State Theatre.

“I cried the whole time. It was wonderful. It gives you so much hope,” said Kyle Richardson, who watched the film Sunday with her mother, Marge Lucero.

“They’re talking about how to stay out of nursing homes, keep medication at bay. It makes a big difference,” said Cynthia DenBrave. She is president of the Alzheimer/Dementia Support Center, which the $5 ticket proceeds benefited.

She lost her mother and aunt to Alzheimer’s disease and, like others at the show, could attest firsthand to the way music reached loved ones they felt slipping away.

“Music therapy and art therapy are two of the most important therapies in years,” DenBrave said. “My aunt would listen to music in the car. She would sing along to all the songs from her youth. That’s the only time we heard her voice. She couldn’t speak (by then),” she said.

“It was the only way I could keep Jerry calm,” said Alison Hetrick, recalling her husband’s last weeks. She joined the support center as she cared for him and stayed on after his death. “They’re family now,” she said.

“The last six weeks, there wasn’t a moment there wasn’t music going,” said Jewell Kee, who cared for her husband with Alzheimer’s. She kept a CD playing around the clock, she said. “It was the only way I knew there was a power outage, when it stopped playing.”

Music works, said Jocelyn Raese, a community educator with Optimal Hospice Care. “We definitely have seen a positive impact from music therapy. It seems to reawaken the memory,” she said.

The showing was sponsored by area residential facilities and care providers who work with seniors who have memory loss. Organizer Christina Mize, marketing director at the Stratford at Beyer Park, said the screening started with a wish to see the film, which has only shown in larger markets.

“We could have just taken a bus (to the Bay Area) and seen it, but we knew there were so many people here who could benefit from it,” she said. Nurses were offered continuing education through the event, which also kicked off a collection of MP3 players.

The Stratford offers assisted living, a higher point on a wide continuum of care facility licenses. The film presented harsh views of patients in more severe levels of institutional care, part of a critical look at elder care in America.

Other world cultures value their elders, but in the dependence-averse U.S. culture, the infirm tend to be hidden away and forgotten, the film asserts. Half the people in nursing homes get no visitors, it says, with 20 percent given anti-psychotic drugs.

“What we’re spending on drugs that mostly don’t work dwarfs what it would take to deliver personal music to every nursing home resident in America,” gerontologist Dr. Bill Thomas says in the film.

The film’s advocacy touched Carol Howard, who works with Optimal Hospice. “I think it didn’t emphasize enough about individuals and their lives. Personalization of music helps a lot, but it’s all about helping our seniors,” Howard said. “Music can triumph when medication falls very short.”

In lighter moments, the camera follows man-on-a-mission Dan Cohen as he brings personalized music to patients with advanced memory loss. Several sit hunched and unresponsive until the music begins, when their eyes open and they tap, dance or sing along. Less advanced patients speak with clarity and insight, telling detailed stories of their lives, as weeping caregivers find they are the ones unable to speak.

The film notes there are 5 million people with dementia nationwide, with about 10 million people involved in caring for them.

Though its premise was help for the elderly, a few of the film’s subjects had playlists straight from her high school days, DenBrave said. “With early onset (Alzheimer cases), these are no longer my elders. They’re my peers,” she said.

This story was originally published November 2, 2014 at 9:18 PM with the headline "Documentary on Alzheimer’s patients touches a chord in Modesto."