We see a man giving a speech at his mother’s wake. It starts off as you might expect. But he goes on to tell us how his mother died multiple times in the eyes of those who loved her. When she became convinced her friends were stealing from her. When she asked him, her son, what his name was. When she looked straight through his dad. Then he says she died a final time surrounded by the people who loved her.

This is the latest ad from the Alzheimer’s Society. Anna had dementia. At the end, a voiceover from Colin Firth tells us: “With dementia, you don’t just die once, you die again, and again, and again. Which is why at Alzheimer’s Society, we’ll be with you again, and again, and again.”

I found it immensely uncomfortable to watch. Using death as a metaphor to describe the progression of a disease experienced by someone living struck me as horribly dehumanising. Throughout the ad we see Anna in her last years juxtaposed against clips of a vivacious younger woman; the message of the video seems to be, that was Anna then; this confused, silent character is who she is now. I’m not alone in this reaction; on social media many said they found it upsetting and offensive, alongside some positive responses from those who feel it spoke to their experience.

The ad – which the society says was made with significant input from people living with dementia – has been very divisive within dementia advocacy: some groups who were consulted have publicly distanced themselves from it, and Alzheimer Scotland put out a dissenting statement about........

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