Health Story Type: Film or Television

Crip Camp

“Crip Camp” is a Netflix documentary produced by Barack and Michelle Obama that traces the origins of the US Disability rights movement to a summer camp for disabled youth called Camp Jened. The film showcases the strong bonds formed at this unique camp that provided a place for self-discovery, authenticity, mutual support, and connection for disabled teens living in a predominantly able-bodied world. The film then follows a group of camp alumni who went on to become advocates for disability rights, putting political pressure on both state and federal authorities. Their tireless efforts eventually led to the passage of the historic Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990. Camper and staff member’s personal narratives are woven throughout the film, personalizing disability in a way that calls viewers to question stereotypes about disabled people, thus functioning as a tool for education and advocacy in and of itself. These stories, often heartfelt and humorous, touch on everything from personal relationships, sex lives, employment, and hierarchy within the disabled community itself. The documentary runs for 1 hour and 42 minutes and combines footage from the camp’s heyday in the 70s with present-day interviews with the attendees. This film could be relevant to classes on healthcare, disability studies, public health, or social justice to facilitate discussion about physical disabilities, advocacy and activism, healthcare policy, or intersectionality. The film could raise questions about the role personal narratives play in shaping public perceptions of disability and health, who counts as “all” when we think about “access for all,” and what patient-centered care can actually look like, as exemplified by the individuals at Camp Jened.

States of Grace

The film States of Grace intimately captures the profound transformation of a revered physician and her family in the wake of a life-changing accident. Dr. Grace Dammann, a pioneering AIDS specialist and devout Buddhist who was honored by the Dalai Lama, was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge on her routine commute when another driver crashed head on into her car. After seven weeks in a coma and a dozen surgeries, Grace miraculously awoke with her cognitive abilities intact, though her body was left shattered. States of Grace follows her return home to where her partner Nancy “Fu” Schroeder becomes Grace’s primary caregiver, while also caring for their teenage daughter Sabrina, who was born with cerebral palsy. Grace, meanwhile, must reconcile her joy at still being alive with the frustration of being so dependent on others. Through verité footage and interviews with doctors, family, and friends, the film paints an inspiring portrait of devotion and trust as it delicately documents one woman’s fight to reinvent herself. Through Grace and Fu’s story, this film explores many aspects of health studies, including the shift from provider to patient, role redefinition when a family member becomes a primary caregiver, the role that spirituality can play in healing, parenthood, and more.

A Lion in the House

“A Lion in the House” is a 3-hour and 45-minute long documentary about childhood cancer available on Netflix. This emotional and powerful documentary follows the lives of five children battling cancer and spans over six years. The film provides an intimate and unfiltered look at the challenges faced by the young patients, their families, and even the healthcare providers caring for them. Some of the challenges addressed in this film include parenting a sick child, experiencing pain and isolation as a sick child, financial struggles as a family fighting illness, and the toll childhood illness takes on physicians’ emotional wellbeing. Using storytelling and candid interviews, the documentary explores the complex emotions of grief, sadness, hope, and so many more that arise when confronting a life-threatening illness like cancer. Viewers will gain insight to the multi-layered challenge that cancer is, confronting topics of decisions surrounding death, pain, isolation, friendship, and financial stress. The openness of this film reveals the difficult decisions cancer brings, especially when choices have to be made for a child. This film is a very moving and real portrayal of the waves of heartbreak and hope that come with childhood cancer. This film is unique as it shares the perspectives of everyone involved in the process of treating cancer and could be used in any course interested in working with a very raw personal narrative. One example of a contrast revealed is the different challenges faced by parents, children, and physicians. Children experience the pain and loneliness, parents have to make life-changing decisions for their children, and physicians have to inform about and execute treatment plans taking into account both physical and emotional limitations. Because of the many perspectives shared, it could be a useful film for healthcare students or for any students learning about childhood illness, death and dying, and approaching medical care holistically. Additionally, it raises questions regarding consent and making medical decisions for children, and could be used in a course surrounding medical ethics. One of the stories told in the film is the story of Tim, who was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma. Tim is a vibrant and spunky fifteen year old who’s symptoms were initially brushed off by physicians. He had a persistent cough and swollen lymph nodes, and was eventually emergently rushed to the hospital, where he got his diagnosis. Tim has a large family, living with siblings, extended family, and his mother, Marietha. In his teen years, Tim says that he enjoys all of the attention he gets because of his diagnosis, and is resistant to take his medications and listening to his mom and team of physicians. A nurse explains that by not listening, Tim is upholding his “cool” image, and eventually needs a nasogastric tube because of it. On top of his lymphoma, Tim lost his father, which his psychiatrist explains has really limited his social life. Through everything, even a period of his cancer worsening, Tim persists and remains joyful. Eventually, Tim joins a school program for students who are behind, like him, and begins a job at McDonalds. After a special trip that he and his mother take to Chicago, Tim becomes incredibly ill, once again. Resistant to the chemotherapy, his condition worsens, and he becomes worried about his death. Tim ends up dying, and the film covers his medical team and family’s grappling with his death. Tim’s story, specifically, is complex and could spark conversations on ethics, facing death as a young person, balancing being a teen and being sick, parent loss, single parenthood, as well as why his story, like others, is an important one to be told.

Worlds Apart

Worlds Apart is a documentary split into four 10-15 minute sections that each focus on a different cross-cultural health experience. We delve into a Muslim man’s journey with stomach cancer when he turned down chemotherapy due to interference with daily prayer. We follow his daughter communicating with the doctor to see if there are any ways that both could be achieved. It also tells the story of a Lao woman with a hole in her heart who can receive surgery to fix it, but whose mother and grandmother are concerned that the scar will inhibit her Buddhist reincarnation. We then see a Black man waiting for a kidney transplant who searches for a nephrologist he can trust and speaks out on the disparity in waiting times for transplants between white and Black patients. Lastly, there is the story of when a Puerto Rican woman with diabetes, hypertension, asthma and depression turns to home remedies after her mother’s death, which she believes was caused by taking too much prescription medication. This documentary showcases narratives that illuminate the limits of Western medicine and expand our ideas of how the American medical system can grow to be more inclusive, equitable, and sensitive. From the intersection between medicine and religion to institutional racism to the clash between types of medicating, Worlds Apart is an excellent resource to learn about a variety of cross-cultural healthcare topics in a person-centered manner. It would fit into more sociological classes like cultural anthropology or a world medicine class, but it could also be useful in a training course for pre-med or med students to broaden their ideas of how to individualize healthcare. It could be shown in class to prompt a discussion or assigned as homework along with a written reflection or essay assignment. View the “Facilitator’s Guide” in the Teaching Materials tab to find more specific ways to integrate it into a course. This documentary is not open access, but it can be viewed on WorldCat, which many institutions have access to.

Pain hustlers

There are many film narratives that relate to opioid addiction, some documentary and others, like this one, "based on true events." Run time is just under 2 hours and there's little sexual or violent content (though plenty of strong language), so it could be used in many undergrad classes: health communication, media studies, pre-health professions. The focus is on a mythical small pharmaceutical company that hits a goldmine when a bright young woman figures out how to market their brand of fentanyl to greedy, unscrupulous doctors. She tries to keep the men in charge of the company within ethical and legal bounds, without success, and the epidemic of addiction follows its well-known course. At the end there is footage of real pharma executives receiving real prison sentences, reminding the audience this isn't just a fable. Advantage of a drama over documentary - or perhaps in tandem with one - is opening questions of sympathetic portrayals and power differences based on sex and class. Available on Netflix.

Extremis

25 minute documentary filmed in a hospital that shows patients, families and health care professionals (Dr. Jessica Zitter, pulmonary/ER specialist and palliative care, is featured. See her book Extreme Measures: Finding a Better Path to the End of Life") dealing with end of life moments. Talking through concrete decisions of whether to take a loved one off a ventilator in the same room where the patient lies captures the difficulty of those decisions in agonizing detail. Short enough to show in a class, might be too intense for many audiences (maybe to stimulate discussion among pre-med or medical students). Could be used with a reading like "Letting go," by Atul Gawande, but content warnings are essential. Academy Award nominee.

Film can help us look disability in the eye.

This editorial (2 pages plus 4 links to videos) argues that US Americans are uncomfortable with disabilities and that filmmaking can make it easier for them to do so. The author tells his story of being misunderstood and having awkward interactions many times because of his condition (medical name not given) that he calls "whale eyes:" misalignment of his eyes so people can't tell where he's looking. He started by making a film his senior year in college to show his family how the world looks to him and how he works around his condition to read, write, cook, and navigate the world. From there he started making more films with disabled people - one with face blindness, another going blind, a stutterer - so they could tell their stories in similar ways. Videos linked to the article are 8-12 minutes long and all focus on "experiencing" the disability: See what the face-blind person experiences (recognizable faces are shown upside down and sure enough, you can't identify them). Listen to the stutterer actively filtering out their fluency issues with an imaginary machine called a "Listenometer." Useful as insight into non-medically focused stories of disabilities, or as examples for a digital storytelling activity.

Art + Medicine | Speaking of Race

This one hour PBS broadcast features voices of many physicians of color at the University of Minnesota. Each physician talks about instances of race impacting their practice as well as the care that patients of color receive. It begins discussion of why race is important to talk about in health care and ends on each provider's favorite aspect of teaching and medicine.

Cigarettes

Juice WRLD (Jarad Higgins) was a rapper who was open about his struggles with addiction, depression and anxiety. He died of a drug overdose in 2019. Many of his music videos can be read as illness narratives. This one has an ultimately upbeat message, as the protagonist goes to AA and gets sober. It begins with a "Text this number for confidential help" message onscreen. This could work in any music/popular media class to talk about health narratives or could be part of an assignment to build a play list around a topic with annotations.

Aftershock

This documentary tells the stories of two Black women who died during or after childbirth, through interviews with their family members. The film examines the higher rates of infant mortality in the US, and especially for Black women, who are 3 to 4 times more likely to die from childbirth-related reasons than White women. The film shows how family members became activists for maternal health care. The award-winning film premiered at Sundance in 2022 and is (at the time of this writing) available on Hulu. It could be used to show how narratives can bring statistics to life, as well as the power of narrative for social change.