Film: A Beautiful Mind
A Beautiful Mind is a film that is based on the life of a famous mathematician and Nobel Prize winner John Nash. In the film, John Nash is a known mathematical genius who was accepted to the university of Princeton. However, after being accepted to the university, Nash faced many challenges as he is unable to handle being social such being able to talk to the opposite sex in the proper manner nor attending class because of Nash's belief that nobody likes him, nor does he like people. In the movie, John Nash was diagnosed by a psychiatrist with schizophrenia because of the delusions he had and being unable to distinguish his imagination and reality. Symptoms for schizophrenia includes having difficulties in having social relationships, inability to distinguish from reality to imaginary, and able to have a clear thought process (Schizophrenia - PubMed Health).
In the film, John Nash's character was introduced based on Nash's own perspective of himself and his surroundings. In Princeton, Nash was shown to have a lack in ability to act normally in social events unless it was with his close friends such as Sol and Bender. Based on the idea that this was Nash's own perspective from the beginning of the movie, we can agree that Nash had a lack of confidence in acting normal in social events. We find out that Nash's friend Charles, whom Nash believed was his roommate throughout college never existed; rather he was an hallucination of Nash's mind. Nash does bring symptoms that link towards the diagnosis of schizophrenia because Nash did not have any hallucinations before entering Princeton university, yet he did have social interaction complications during his high school years. Like the timeline of Schizophre...
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...ibrium even after many after his theory was published. Yet, John Nash is just one example of the many people with limitations through being mentally ill, but each and every one of these people are potentials of a beautiful mind.
Reference Page
Nash biography. MacTutor History of Mathematics. Retrieved February 22, 2013, from http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Nash.html
OCD and Schizophrenia - Learn More About OCD and Schizophrenia. OCD - Learn About OCD Symptoms and Treatment for OCD. Retrieved February 21, 2013, from http://ocd.about.com/od/otheranxietydisorders/a/OCD_schizophrenia.htm
Rosenberg, R. S., & Kosslyn, S. M. (2011). Abnormal psychology. New York: Worth
Schizophrenia - PubMed Health. National Center for Biotechnology Information. Retrieved February 21, 2013, from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PM
One of the most surprising yet basic and simple facts of schizophrenia is one that is often unknown and underestimated, that being the prevalence of the illness. While many think it a rare disorder that only a select few possess, quite the opposite is true. Approximately 1% of the world population develops schizophrenia and in the United States, around 3 million people are afflicted by the illness (Nemade and Dombeck, www.mentalhelp.net). In the United States, there are twice as many people suffering from schizophrenia as Alzheimer’s, five times as many as MS and sixty times as many as muscular dystrophy (www.schizophrenia.com). Ranking in the top ten most common disabling conditions (www.psychiatrictimes.com), schizophrenia, instead of a confined and uncommon, is one of the most prevalent and distributed illnesses worldwide.
Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain that is expressed clinically as a disease of the mind. Once it strikes, morbidity is high (60% of patients are receiving disability benefits within the first year of onset) as is mortality (the suicide rate is 10%). (www.nejm.org/content/1999/0340/008/0645.asp). Because its symptoms and signs and associated cognitive abnormalities are diverse, researchers have been unable to find localization in a single region of the brain. This essay will discuss the symptoms, treatments and causes of schizophrenia.
10 May 2012. . Segal, Jeanne and Melinda Smith. "Understanding Schizophrenia. "
The type of emotional disturbance John Nash experiences is paranoid schizophrenia. Some hallucination John Nash had was his imaginary roommate Charles Herman and Marcee. He had trouble distinguishing what was real and when he thought he was a spy hiding from the Russian. He had problems communicating with others.
John Nash, the main character, faces many challenges in his professional life as well as in his personal life. His friends who later become his colleagues think that he is just plain crazy. They also find him entertaining. However, they cannot resist looking down on him for his strange behavior, difficulties with deadlines, and hardship with women. John is often distracted by visual hallucinations, experiences involuntary movements, and has issues communicating with others appropriately. Despite his illness, John Nash proves the Brouwer’s fixed point theorem while he is still attending Princeton University, and he finally earns his peers’ and his professor’s respect. He marries a graduate student, Alicia. She does not have any knowledge of John’s mental disorder until his condition begins to worsen and he becomes institutionalized and diagnosed with schizophrenia. She loves him and feels obligated to take care of him even though John endangers her and their baby’s life as well. She realizes that staying with Nash is a major responsibility; nevertheless, she decides to care for him and to deal with the consequences. Unfortunately, schizophrenia is a complex and misunderstood mental condition, sometimes resulting in society’s intolerance for those suffering from this illness, including John Nash. Societ...
"Schizophrenia." NIMH RSS. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.
Treatment. John was hospitalized against his will in a mental institution with close watch by a psychiatrist. He is treated for schizophrenia with shock therapy using insulin treatments. He is also given medications in pill form that he must take throughout the day, although the pills are never named in the film. Also, toward the end of the film and during the end of John’s life, he starts taking the “newer medications.” Based on his behavior on the newer medications, they had less of a blunting effect on his personality. According to Kahn and Sommer, the best way to treat schizophrenia is to intervene in the process of the disease before deteriorations in the brain occur, which can be irreversible (2014). Additionally, it has been found that over long periods of time, antipsychotic medications do not reduce the frequency of psychosis schizophrenia (Harrow, Jobe, and Faull, 2014). Despite this fact, antipsychotics remain the first line of treatment for schizophrenia (Lehman, Steinwachs, 1998). This is consistent with the movie. John Nash continues to experience hallucinations despite the use of medications; however, his delusions decrease as the movie goes on. Although the medications helped, they did not completely eliminate his symptoms. According to Kring, in addition to antipsychotic medications, social skills training can also be affective (2013). This is also evidenced in the movie when John seeks a job at Princeton to gain more social interaction and develop better relations with his peers. Shean agrees with this and claims that antipsychotic drugs should be a supplement to psychosocial therapies (2013). Although John never had any formal therapy, or at least the movie did not show it, the movie still emphasized his need for social interaction in addition to his medicine to get
Statement of significance: John Nash was affected with paranoid schizophrenia at the age of 31, affecting the way a person acts accordidgly to a situation.
“A Beautiful Mind”, a movie based on true events, captures the essence of living with a chronic mental Illness. John Nash, the individual whose life is exposed in this film, suffers from Schizophrenia. This movie directed by Jon Howard incorporates some key points by introducing the illness and providing an in depth focus on the symptomology. The extraordinary acting in this movie illustrates the complexity of the mind, the pathophysiology of mental illness, as well as its burden on caregivers. Provided in this paper is a basic foundation of Schizophrenia, and the use of an award winning movie to exemplify the complexity of the illness and is ability to distort reality.
Nash showed much change in the way he was functioning through the movie. After treatment, it seemed like he had his disease under control, but he still had problems disbelieving in his hallucinations by still acting on them. For example, he still thought he was working for the government by helping them decode secrete codes in the newspapers. He tried to hide this from his wife by keeping all his work hidden in a shed. Eventually, Nash's life is seen as he returns to the college to teach and continues completing his mathematics work, while still seeing the delusions. This life is clearly far from normal. But for Nash, it also seems the best option.
In the 2001 biographical drama film A Beautiful Mind, John Nash is an American mathematician who suffers from a mental illness. At the beginning of the film, Nash arrives at Princeton University as a co-recipient of the prestigious Carnegie Scholarship for mathematics. Nash is an arrogant, socially awkward graduate student, who devotes most of his time trying to discover a revolutionary equation in mathematics. About halfway through the film, we discover that a certain number of people and events that occur are actually hallucinations and delusions created within Nash's mind. At this point, it becomes apparent to the audience that Nash is suffering from a severe mental disorder.
Many of the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia are similar to the actions and behaviors of John Nash. The largest of which is John’s hallucinations in which he sees many different individuals and makes up fantasies in his head to distort his reality. The hallucinations are one of the main reasons why Nash can be identified with this disease, however the similarities do not stop there. Nash also shows great paranoia in all aspects of his life, from his work to his personal life he is always watching out for new people who he doesn’t know. He shows unexplained anger when reality does not go how he likes it, which can be explained by his inability to determine reality from fantasy, and overall, his hallucinations. Similarly, Nash has an inability to connect with people on an emotional level, due to his hallucinations which interact with him in a way which he finds pleasing, unlike reality. To top all of this off he has a severe case of anxiety, one which can be characterized by his constant habit of itching his forehead, which becomes more common when he is nervous or uncomfortable. Due to the immense connections between John’s behavior and the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, it is clear that he has this
John Nash grew up in West Virginia with his mother and father, both of whom passed away when John was 20 years old. Growing up, John was an only child and had shown no signs of schizophrenia other than a lack in social skills. His parents had attributed his lack of social skills to his superior intelligence to all other children his age.
A Beautiful Mind tells the life story of John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner who struggled through most of his adult life with schizophrenia. Directed by Ron Howard, this becomes a tale not only of one man's battle to overcome his own disability, but of the overreaching power of love - a theme that has been shown by many films that I enjoy.
The film “A Beautiful Mind” depicts the life of Nobel Prize winner John Nash. It takes us on a journey that begins with him at Princeton University studying mathematics and trying to come up with an original idea for publication. At Princeton University we then meet his roommate and best friend, Charles Herman, who seems to be the only person that understands and puts up with him. After university he begins to work at MIT and years later gets invited to the Pentagon to decipher telecommunication codes. While working at MIT, we meet William Parcher from the United States Department of Defense, who offers him a new exciting, secretive assignment. John Nash begins to work secretively as spy to help against Russian spies. Around that time, he also begins to date and eventually gets married to a student of his from MIT.