WA cartoonist shares his Parkinson’s story on ‘Matter of Mind’ on PBS

Political cartoonist Peter Dunlap-Shohl, who splits his time between living in Coulee Dam, Okanogan County, and Anchorage, Alaska, is one of three people living with Parkinson’s disease profiled in PBS’ one-hour “Independent Lens” film “Matter of Mind: My Parkinson’s” (11 p.m. April 8, KCTS-TV).

The second in a three-film series about the rise in neurodegenerative diseases — last year’s “Matter of Mind” was on Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis); next year’s installment is about Alzheimer’s — the film shows Dunlap-Shohl’s journey managing Parkinson’s, which he was diagnosed with at age 43 while working as political cartoonist for the Anchorage Daily News, a job he left in 2008 due to the disease.

“But he’s now adapted and is continuing to produce really meaningful work both about Parkinson’s and on other topics,” says Laura Green, who co-directed “Matter of Mind” with Anna Moot-Levin. “We see this as a tremendously hopeful story that people with Parkinson’s can adapt in ways to continue to pursue their passions and their life’s work.”

Now 65, Dunlap-Shohl is shown in the film taking large steps and loudly vocalizing, exercises designed for Parkinson’s patients.

“What happens with Parkinson’s is your brain recalibrates what it thinks is big and what it thinks is loud,” Dunlap-Shohl says. “When you have Parkinson’s, you think you’re talking at the same volume, but you have to go past what you think is normal to make sound that approaches normal.”

He hopes those who have Parkinson’s — about 1 million Americans — will be inspired to exercise, which he considers “the most potent treatment.” Dunlap-Shohl also bikes.

“The best kind of exercise is cardiovascular, where you can exercise 85% of your maximum heart rate for a half-hour three times a week,” he says. “That seems to modify the disease’s progress, so it generally takes longer for you to reach your decrepit state.”

Dunlap-Shohl had deep brain stimulation surgery, a Parkinson’s treatment, in 2009 and since then he’s written and illustrated two books, “My Degeneration: A Journey Through Parkinson’s” in 2015, about his efforts to accept the disease’s “malicious whimsy,” and “Nuking Alaska: Notes of an Atomic Fugitive” in 2023, about tragicomic threats Alaska faced during the Cold War. He found a new way to draw using computer programs that he previously despised. (“That was a massive failure of vision,” he says now.) Working on an iPad allowed him to rebuild his hand-drawn style that’s on display in his books and gets animated in “Matter of Mind.”

“To lose the ability to draw would be a catastrophic loss of myself,” Dunlap-Shohl says in the film. “In a sense, I’d be snuffed out while I was still alive.”

Green and Moot-Levin found Dunlap-Shohl through his blog in 2018 while doing research at the film’s outset.

“We were so excited about the way he uses humor to really draw people into the world of Parkinson’s,” Moot-Levin says. “He has this incredibly longitudinal perspective of living with Parkinson’s for 20 years now. He’s gone through a lot with the illness and really adapted to living with this illness while continuing his career now as a graphic novelist.”

The filmmakers trained their cameras on Dunlap-Shohl in December 2018 and again in 2022 including during a treatment visit to Evergreen Health’s Booth Gardner Parkinson’s Care Center in Kirkland. Parkinson’s is the reason Dunlap-Shohl began splitting his time between Alaska and Washington about four years ago, moving to Coulee Dam, where his wife spent her summers growing up.

“We had to move because I needed more sophisticated care than I was able to get in Anchorage,” he says.

Moot-Levin says Dunlap-Shohl’s story highlights the importance of access to health care and the impact that has on individuals with Parkinson’s and their families.

“Parkinson’s is an incredibly complex illness and even a general neurologist once you get to a certain point can’t really effectively treat it,” she says. “There is a real need to increase access to movement disorder specialists, which are the type of neurologists that treat Parkinson’s specifically.”

Green says while people often speak about “fighting an illness” and working “to beat it,” neurodegenerative diseases are not illnesses that can be cured, so the emphasis needs to be on management and adaptation.

“All of the people in the film are having such tremendous persistence while also saying, ‘Yes, my life can change and my life can still be rich and meaningful in terms of living with the illness,’ ” she says. “Given that these illnesses are all incurable at this point, that’s really something we wanted to emphasize because there’s a hopelessness that can come with this diagnosis, which of course makes perfect sense, but we also hope people can find other things in these stories.”