the Queen's mother in law

speaking of how Hollywood portrays religious folks as schizophrenics: in season 3 of NetFlix series the Crown, they have a depiction of the Queens' mother in law, Princess Alice, who actually had a nervous breakdown in middle age complete with religious hallucinations and delusions, but who overcame it.

the Crown doesn't go into details, but the BBC had a documentary about her





Wikipedia article about her LINK

Scribd had her biography with lots more details, and I found quite a few reasons behind why she had her nervous breakdown, including that she was born deaf, that nevertheless she ran hospitals during World War I, had a husband who almost was executed, and later they were thrown out of Greece and penniless.

Menopausal hormone fluctuations tipped her over the brink into a psychotic depression (which is why Freud suggested radiation to shut down her ovaries to calm her symptoms, and the shock treatment was used because it was the only thing they had back then, but even today shock treatment is used for severe cases of depression that don't respond to medicines).

yet she overcame her illness: although she would talk strangely about her religious delusions if pressed, she did manage to function in her later life.

during World War II, she stayed in Greece helping the destitute, and even hid a Jewish family in her flat. When the Germans came to inspect the flat, she played the deaf card and they figured she was crazy and didn't check upstairs.

one of the inspirations to Alice to become a "nun" and establish an order of active sisters in the Greek Orthodox church was her cousin Ella,the sister of Tsarina Alix, who also founded an active order in the Russian Orthodox church after her husband was assassinated.




usually one only reads about the excesses of royalty, but reading the stories of these two ladies sort of makes all those Disney princess type fantasies look like nonsense.

I found both the Crown and the earlier TV series Victoria a bit on the boring side, but in these days of super heroes being replaced with asexual athletic young women who can beat the stuffing out of the enemy but don't seem to know about boring things like logistics of running a country and surviving political manipulations while raising a family, which is the sub context of both these series, nor do the Marvel superheroines seem to be very practical, such as in the case of Alice and Ella, doing the logistics of getting supplies etc. to run hospitals, train nursing staff, and actually do hands on care.