Aphasia is a brain disorder that affects one’s speech and other cognitive abilities, so his condition forces him to retire from acting.
14 thoughts on “Bruce Willis announced he’s been diagnosed with Aphasia.”
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Aphasia is a brain disorder that affects one’s speech and other cognitive abilities, so his condition forces him to retire from acting.
Comments are closed.
@Michael Thanks & a hat tip. FTFY: vicious, of course.
@Burmese Additional good info:
https://medicalaphasia.blogspot.com
When I hear “aphasia”, I immediately think of one of the clinical words that has stuck in my memory: prosopagnosia = face blind. Brad Pitt claims to suffer a mild form of this.
@Roger Technical words often don’t so much fall into disuse as balkanize into pockets—schools or disciplines. My “nephrologist” is a “renal” specialist. And adrenaline = epinephrine. Both are still used because their use persisted in different circles. In the case of “aphasia”, there’s lay use, which ebbs & flows. And we have professional contexts: clinical, psychiatry, psychology, neurology & neuroscience.
Most of what’s known about how the brain works comes from clinical cases. Rest assured, just because we don’t hear a term in the street so much anymore, it doesn’t mean it isn’t still familiar to practitioners; health workers, I mean.
Most of my career—I’m a computer programmer = software = coder—my job title was “firmware engineer”. Had I worked for IBM, I’d have been a “microcoder”.
We’ve discussed here the preference within a community to adopt a medical-sounding term that Uncle Scoopy considered malformed & arbitrary (ergo bullshit). There, again, the difference of opinion is driven by non-overlap of personal bubbles. “Acceptable” usage in English is “governed” by experience & indoctrination. Being able to “judge” another person’s usage isn’t a reliable signal of superiority in any capacity. (And when I say English, I use it as my stand-in for “language”.)
I used to take grammar & spelling so seriously. I still think I’m “informed” in a way that not everyone is. But we have bigger fish to fry, don’t we? We’re swimming in so much stupidity. And then there’s the flat out lying in our public discourse. Fake shock = performative. On the left it’s virtue signaling & canceling, on the right it’s anti-vax or anti-trans or critical race theory. It’s all nuts! To pick nits now is spitting into the wind.
Thanks, MyKey. Nomenclature can be both illuminating and baffling. I remember when there was a fad for calling a heart attack a “myocardial infarction”. I have no idea what that was about, but that’s another term I haven’t heard for years.
Myocardial infarction is still the standard medical term and it always will be. People may use “heart attack” to apply to things like myocardial infarction, angina, sudden cardiac death, arrhythmias, etc. but while there may be some overlap in specific people, these are all distinct entities.
To me, aphasia is an old term, like “dementia praecox”. I didn’t know it was still in use. Perhaps it stayed useful because it described a class of symptoms, rather than being a diagnosis.
It refers to a constellation of symptoms that can have different etiologies in different individuals, so it’s more a syndrome than a disease. At least that’s how I’ve understood it.
I think you are basically right. Aphasia is more like a generic description of symptoms, like “headache,” rather than a specific medical diagnosis. It means a loss of the ability to communicate, especially verbally. You don’t really need a doctor to diagnose the loss of communication skills. It’s obvious. You do need a doctor to determine why the condition exists, and how to treat it (if possible).
It always accompanies Alzheimer’s, for example, or it may be caused by a severe head injury, or it may be the result of a stroke, or it may be the result of a brain disease. That’s the end of my understanding.
According to many in Hollywood, Willis’s condition has been deteriorating for years, meaning that he may have a condition called primary progressive aphasia, which is genetic and very slow to develop, as opposed to those forms caused by a sudden, traumatic incident like a stroke or a car accident.
To my knowledge, that’s all speculation. There is wide agreement that Willis is afflicted with aphasia, but no revelation about the cause. When all is said and done, it that important to us? As somebody else mentioned in this thread about another subject, we have more important things to worry about. Bottom line: actors need language and communication, and he’s losing that ability, so he sensibly stepped aside. He allowed his reasons to be public knowledge. His family is behind him. In other words, everybody did the right thing. End of story, as I see it. Relax and live your best life, Bruce. You’ve earned it.
I have to admit that I never expected this thread to generate any discussion beyond, “Good luck in the future, and yippee-ky-yay, Mr. Falcon.”
Megadittos. I never wanted to be the sort of person who’d be entertained by (and liked) Die Hard & similar Willis credits. But I was who I am instead of who I thought I ought to be. I’m grateful to him & Demi & Rob Lowe & the rest of the Brat Pack members I used to look down on… for leading me to myself. A person who thankfully can enjoy crap as much as the person sitting next to me in a theater.
I have had kind of a parallel evolution. I have always had a highbrow and lowbrow sensibility, but was snobbish about mainstream, middlebrow entertainment, and couldn’t seem to be kind to it except ironically. Over the years of doing this however, I have genuinely come to love the film and TV people who just want to entertain us.
I don’t mean the ones who fail. I always loved loved ridiculing them. But now I like some mainstream shows and films that succeed in doing nothing more than entertaining us.
Panem et circenses semper!
Mind you, I still hate reality TV and some sap like TV medical dramas, but I have really gained an appreciation for the people who can make us laugh and cry, even if their techniques are contrived, and I have especially come to admire the people who can just tell a good story that holds my attention.
The me of 40 years ago could never have imagined how much I would enjoy that new HBO series about the Lakers, but dammit, I really look forward to every installment.
Popcorn & a movie too pricey? Nah, fuhgeddaboudit. Semper Finance!
Yeah, a good story… That’s the ticket!
What I like is a story, with all the trimmings. Grab me, draw me in, make me feel things. Don’t just drop me one signal after another about how I’m supposed to feel at this moment. I hate the buttons that writers push now that used to accentuate such moments, but once we got trained to salivate at the bell, it’s enough to just ring the bell & no food coming. It’s a gyp, I tell ya. I paid good money, I want some quality.
“yippee-ky-yay, Mr. Falcon”
That was unquestionably one of the most iconic TV edits. Not every TV edit was equally awesome.
In 1980, a theatrical Get Smart film was released called “The Nude Bomb.” It starred Don Adams but was missing Barbara Feldon. I saw it in the theater and thought it was pretty funny. Of course I was 12 at the time. But it was on TV a few months later with the worst TV edit I have ever seen. The theatrical version was rated PG, so you would think it wouldn’t require heavy editing. I don’t recall much if any swearing. But it had lots of double entendres. They did their best to get rid of them.
First, they had to change the title because you can’t have a nude title on TV! So the new title was “The Return of Maxwell Smart. Then they went through and really destroyed almost every funny line. There are 2 that I remember. The first was when Maxwell Smart sticks his revolver in his waistband and it goes off. He turns around, you hear a zip and he turns back and says his iconic line from the series “Missed it by that much.” In the TV version, the line was changed to “Missed the bone by that much.” There is also a Q like character that goes around showing Max all the gadgets in his apartment. Before he leaves, he calls in to Control headquarters and says “I’ll be back in the office in (some) minutes. If you need to reach me before that, you can call me on my jock strap, but for God’s sake only ring once!” In the TV version, jockstrap became throat spray.
My mother suffered a stroke in 2010 and developed aphasia as a result. After rehab and therapy she recovered to between 90 and 95 percent of her pre-stroke baseline. Sometimes she would say things that didn’t make any sense because a word would be replaced with a random word that had nothing to do with what she was trying to say. When she was upset the aphasia would get worse. Sometimes it was the aphasia making her upset because we didn’t understand what she was trying to say. I can see how it might have been worse for Willis because he had a public image he wanted to retain and speaking gibberish in public wouldn’t help with that. Getting upset and frustrated would probably make the aphasia worse which would just make him more frustrated in a viscous feedback loop.
I’ve been a Bruce Willis fan ever since he played David Addison on Moonlighting. I actually really liked Hudson Hawk. I wish him nothing but the best. Hopefully stepping back from his career will allow him to feel more peaceful and allow his aphasia to improve to a point he has a nice quality of life with his family.
Evidently this has been going on for years and has not been a secret in Hollywood.
I didn’t know what Aphasia was, so I tried to read up about the condition…
Per Mayoclinic, a person with aphasia may:
Speak in short or incomplete sentences
Speak in sentences that don’t make sense
Substitute one word for another or one sound for another
Speak unrecognizable words
Not understand other people’s conversation
Write sentences that don’t make sense
And I thought to myself… That’s totally Trump!
I’m sure Chris Rock will have something to say about it.