Parkinson
This is a documentary project, which aims to go beyond recording and reporting, for this reason you will find people with Parkinson’s developing their daily lives inside.
Parkinson’s Disease (PD) is much more than a neurological disorder that requires specialized medical treatment.
From my particular point of view, Parkinson’s poses a specific problem that goes beyond the medical field and that can well be conceived as marginalization, ignorance and indifference of society. Why worry about Parkinson’s? Why worry if it is not a radically aggressive disease? Why worry if it is not fatal, it is not terminal and its incidence is centered among the less active population? The answer to these questions is not so obvious. Modern society has focused its main values on results, on what is produced. It happens that the man of my time tries to realize himself through economic values. In a context like this, of a productive society, “capabilities” such as utility, success and performance are the virtues to promote and facilitate social recognition. From that perspective, what could be more important than career, work and income? This is precisely what I call a productivist and bureaucratic thought which privileges what you do over what you “are”.
A part of the existence of humanity that should not surprise anyone is aging, understood as a unique and unrepeatable process and experience that has to do with the schemes and values of the subjects involved, but it also has to do, and a lot, with public health and human rights issues. I speak of old age as a constitutive stage of life and as such in the sphere of ethical values (of what one “is”) above “productive capacities”.
Viennese psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl wrote about what is primary and fundamental to live with dignity with human meaning; he calls it “the meaning of life”. I believe that the meaning of life goes beyond the concepts of utility, success, performance and goes through duties and personal commitments. In taking care of myself and not attributing to others the deficiencies of my actions, attitudes, decisions and illnesses. But what is decisive is that the healthy or sick man, skillful or clumsy, successful or a victim of failure, long-lived or young, be treated with dignity. As Dr. Ulises Rodríguez, neurologist at the INNN, says, “among the symbols of humanism and civility in a society, the most important are respect for old age and illness.”
The healthy long-lived individual and the sick, including the patient with Parkinson’s, have the right to full treatment by the State, they have the right to be classified as carriers of a highly limiting condition, and they have the right to be taken into account in all spheres of society. For this reason, in the face of indifference, it is necessary to raise awareness and promote ethical treatment. I believe that Ramón intends, with this documentary project, to show the power not only of standing up, but of wanting to defeat the disease and at the same time to spread the spirit with which the Parkinson’s patient lives. I believe that these photographs show the transcendence of the “undesirable” (term we use when referring to Parkinson’s), of the strength of daily struggle and fear.
Nothing ties me, I open my arms, I am ready to receive energy, happiness, peace and love. I do not ask for miracles or impossible. I know that as Parkinson’s patients our horizon is that we will probably live many years in dependence and still pursue the meaning of life in which we are all involved. I believe in the researchers, in the doctors, in the men and women who support us. I appreciate the affection, affection and true love of our family and friends. The decisive thing is to put before indifference, the moral integrity of those who, even having Parkinson’s, do not shake our pulse to make day-to-day decisions.