Chevy's emotional holiday ad features a grandmother with Alzheimer's engaging in reminiscence therapy. Here's how it works.

Get your tissues out: Chevy’s new Christmas commercial is here, and it might make you weep. It will certainly teach you a bit about a therapy that may help patients with Alzheimer’s disease and other conditions associated with dementia.

The commercial, which was created with assistance from the Alzheimer’s Association, focuses on an elderly woman suffering from the disease. In it, her granddaughter takes her on a jaunt in a 1972 Chevy Suburban, revisiting places from her youth as they listen to John Denver on an 8-track tape. As a result, the grandmother is able to recall some aspects of her life that initially had seemed lost.

It's not just a sweet holiday story, though. As the company worked on the ad with the Alzheimer's Association, they “talked a lot about reminiscence therapy,” Steve Majoros, Chevrolet's head of marketing, told Ad Age. 

So, what exactly is reminiscence therapy, and how does it work?

Whether or not the granddaughter in the ad is aware of it, she and her grandmother are engaging in reminiscence therapy — a kind of psychotherapy that involves helping people recall older memories using both conversation and sensory engagement, according to VeryWell Mind.

It may include listening to a song that has an important resonance — in the commercial, it's Denver's “Sunshine on My Shoulders” — or it could be eating a favorite childhood dessert or even smelling the cologne of a loved one.

Reminiscence therapy is credited to the work of Dr. Robert Butler, a psychiatrist in the field of geriatric medicine in the 1960s, and is sometimes called life review therapy. It can be a helpful tool for people living with Alzheimer's, though it is not used only for people with that condition.

As there is no cure for Alzheimer’s, the goal of reminiscence therapy is not necessarily to help people recall memories, but instead to improve their quality of life. Those patients typically struggle with short-term memory, which can cause considerable distress, but revisiting long-term memories, which are often intact in individuals with Alzheimer’s, can help improve self-esteem and reduce anxiety. It also can help improve the individual’s relationship with the person leading this kind of therapy, often their caregiver.

In that way, the Chevy commercial offers an accurate depiction of how reminiscence therapy can work. (It’s worth noting, though, that people with Alzheimer’s may not recall short-term memories, as the ad’s grandmother does when she realizes she’s due back for Christmas dinner.)

As Majoros told Ad Age, reminiscence therapy is not intended as a “cure or a solve” for Alzheimer’s and other memory-loss conditions, but it can “enable the person going through it to feel more comfortable — and the people that are the caregivers that are surrounding them to also feel more comfortable.”