Brea’s husband is Omar Wasow, who some of you with long media memories may remember as being a prominent personality on cable news and analysis shows back in the ‘90s. Not only has the disease wreaked havoc on Brea’s academic work, it’s cast severe doubt on she and her husband’s ability to start a larger family. This information is parceled out in a coherent documentary style that alternates with the story of Brea herself, her struggles with the disease and its treatment. This is jaw-dropping stuff, made more profoundly disturbing by the fact that so little is known about the disease-its causes, let alone what can effectively treat it. In Denmark, one sufferer, Karina Hansen, was taken by state authorities from her parents' care and placed in a psychiatric hospital because of an institutionalized “it’s all in her head” belief. His “come to Jesus” moment happens when he learns one of their adult daughters has gotten ME somehow. One of them was abandoned by her own damn husband, who was convinced it was psychosomatic. The movie opens up to show other victims of the disease. Forms of paralysis, an inability to withstand bright light, and more, are what she suffers. This is why, I think, Brea is so relentless in documenting her own symptoms, which look utterly miserable. An audio clip of Larry King referring to it as “the yuppie virus” and a visual of the ever-helpful Ricky Gervais making a joke about how the disease is also known as “I don’t want to go to work today” illustrate the point in a shameful way. The diagnosis was the beginning of more trouble, because little is understood of the disease, and in our neck of the Western world, it’s not taken at all seriously. After a hellish diagnosis process, she learned that she had ME, that is, myalgic encephalomyelitis, also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Looks pretty pleasant from the snatches shown here. At the time that Brea was struck with a fever that left her in enervated pain in its wake, she had been living a storybook life of sort, if being an upper middle class academic is your idea of a storybook life. As it happens, “Unrest,” which was directed by Jennifer Brea, the woman in the opening footage, has enough pertinent stuff to say about a little-known and terrifying disease that such nits don’t stick in the mind as the movie ends. We can get to that later, or maybe not at all.
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