A Beautiful Mind is a dramatic depiction of John Nash, Jr.’s life, loosely based on the biography of the same name written by Sylvia Nasar in 1998. The movie opens with a reception speech for newly admitted graduate students in the mathematics department at Princeton and closes with him winning a Nobel Peace Prize in economics for his work in game theory.
During Nash’s time at Princeton, the movie shows him experiencing the beginning of schizophrenia. Initially, the symptoms seem to be relatively benign — he hallucinates having a roommate. However, as progresses through his career he becomes increasingly paranoid and the resulting behaviors endanger his and other people's safety.
After earning his PhD, he becomes an instructor at the Massachusetts
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However, at the expense of telling an action packed story, they sacrifice accuracy and logic. There were multiple points during the movie where I found myself thinking “how’s that possible?” For instance, the scene where Nas hits his head on the window, his fictitious roommate pushes his desk out of the window. Another example, his roommate offers him alcohol. One of the pivotal scenes in the movie is a car chase in which he’s in the passenger seat and a fictitious person drives the car and shoots at the car chasing them. I know the answer to all of these questions is that Nash was doing these things himself since they are not real. However, the movie does not offer clear distinction in the moment of what is real and what is not. And that may be the point, but this does not always work in terms of continuity.
My difficulty accepting the symptoms caused me to look up Nash to see if could learn about his hallucinations and delusions. After watching “A Brilliant Madness” (2002), I realized that the writers of A Beautiful Mind took some liberties with his symptoms and his life in general. One of the bigger changes in the movie was that Alicia filed for divorce after he had been in and out of the hospitals and psychiatric wards. And although he stopped taking his medications around 1970, he managed to make a full recovery. He even got remarried to
In the film, Nathaniel was given a schizophrenia diagnosis. According to the DSM-5 Diagnostic Criteria for Schizophrenia, a diagnosis requires that two or more positive, negative, and/or disorganised symptoms be present for at least 1 month, with at
John Nash’s needs largely influenced his hallucinations. John Nash struggled to connect with other people his entire life. He was an outcast and spent most of his time studying mathematics. His need to connect with another person was fulfilled when he hallucinated he had a roommate. This fictional roommate, Charles, was his closest companion. John confided in Charles whenever he faced a problem. Charles helped him through the struggles he faced while attending Princeton. Charles would also praise John whenever he made accomplishments in his work. John wanted to be appreciated for his hard work at Princeton and Charles made him feel important. John hallucinated that Charles had a young niece, Marcee. The hallucination of Marcee met his need to be a parental figure. He loved Marcee like she was his own daughter and wanted to care for her. Marcee was also comforting presence for John. She was an innocent child who would never harm anyone. John also hallucinated he was working with a secret government official, Parcher. John thought Parcher sought him out for his excellent skills in math. This met John’s need to be praised for his work in mathematics. John wanted to feel important and wanted to use his skills to help the world. When he imagined he was
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.
The film shows many positive symptoms of schizophrenia such as delusions of grandeur, delusions of influence, and persecutory delusions. Positive symptoms of schizophrenia are symptoms that are present in an individual due to the illness. In the movie Nash hallucinates an individual named William Parcher, played by Ed Harris. Parcher works for the United States Department of Defense. He enlists Nash’s help in breaking a Russian code in order to find a portable atomic bomb. The entire situation of the portable atomic bomb is a figment of Nash’s mind. This specific figment falls into the category of delusions of grandeur. The delusion of grandeur entails that an individual begins to think more highly of themselves, and believes that they are more important than other individuals in society. Nash believes that he is the most gifted mathematician, and he is the only individual who can break the Russian codes which are hidden in common day written media. During a mult...
The film, A Beautiful Mind (2001) is the fictional account of the life of a mathematician and the Nobel Prize-winning economist, John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his struggles with schizophrenia. The film was inspired from the unauthorized biography of the same name written by Sylvia Nasar (Wikipedia). Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder through which a person has difficulty in interpreting reality which may result to the combinations of hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking and behavior though this disease is not associated and cannot be referred to with split-personality but it is solely pertinent to disruption of natural balance of thinking and emotions (Mayo Clinic). This case study will feature the titular character of the film (stated above), John Forbes Nash, Jr. The observations and assessments as well as other useful information covered in this study were all based upon the film, A Beautiful Mind (2001).
The movie A Beautiful Mind, directed by Ron Howard, tells the story of Nobel Prize winner, and mathematician, John Nash’s struggle with schizophrenia. The audience is taken through Nash’s life from the moment his hallucinations started to the moment they became out of control. He was forced to learn to live with his illness and learn to control it with the help of Alicia. Throughout the movie the audience learns Nash’s roommate Charles is just a hallucination, and then we learn that most of what the audience has seen from Nash’s perspective is just a hallucination. Nash had a way of working with numbers and he never let his disease get in the way of him doing math. Throughout the movie the audience is shown how impactful and inspirational John Nash was on many people even though he had a huge obstacle to overcome.
“A Beautiful Mind” is a remarkable movie that sheds light on a complicated and debilitating disorder, in which the person seems to have no control over. It is enlightening and heart warming, I would highly recommend this movie. I must admit, the first time I watch the movie, I went into it not knowing anything about schizophrenia and when it was over, I still felt like I didn’t fully understand the disorder; however, the second time I watched with the knowledge of what schizophrenia is and all of the various symptoms and I find it astonishing that Nash was able to overcome the disorder by sheer willpower over his own mind, as he chose to ignore the voices in his head.
The movie, A Beautiful Mind, depicts the life of John Nash and his struggle with the disorder, showing the symptoms and treatment methods used during the time period. In the movie, the main character, John Nash, experiences positive symptoms in which bizarre additions are added to the person’s behavior like disorganized thinking or in Nash’s case, hallucinations. At one point in the movie, John could be considered to have tactile hallucinations (sensations of tingling, burning) mixed with his visual and auditory ones when Parcher implants a device into his arm, causing a stinging or painful sensation. His visual and auditory hallucinations, although auditory hallucinations are considered more common in schizophrenics, the audience is not aware of these symptoms until mid-way through the movie, however, the nonexistent “people” he sees start in grad school with the first one being Charles Herman, his “roommate.” During this time, the main character would be in the prodromal stage of the disorder where the function is decreasing and the symptoms come on gradually at a rate unnoticeable to others, because he is
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR) is a multiaxial classification system for mental disorders. The first axis includes an extensive list of clinical syndromes that typically cause significant impairment. In the case of John Nash, his Axis I diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenia. According to the text, “people with paranoid type schizophrenia have an organized system of delusions and auditory hallucinations that may guide their lives” (Comer, 2011, p. 364). Nash suffered delusions of persecution, fearing that people were out to get him.
The development of Nash’s mental illness was acquired over a period of time. It probably started when he first arrived at Princeton. He was a solitary fellow and didn’t make friends easy. Even with a group of classmates, he tended to be in his own world, with his own thoughts, solving some type of problem. He had anxiety to get a paper published, when other classmates were continuously getting published in journals. This probably escalated his symptoms because of the stress placed on him and produced some form of negativity in his own mind. He wanted to be thought successful, even though he was an introverted type of person.
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.
As portrayed in A Beautiful Mind, John Nash is clearly suffering from Paranoid Schizophrenia, although a case could possibly be made for a secondary diagnosis of OCD. His condition is clearly displayed through a pattern of behavior and symptoms including: distorted perceptions of reality, social withdrawal, paranoia, hallucinations, self-inflicted harm and general irrational behavior. He imagines 3 specific individuals throughout the movie, who accompany him throughout the remainder of his life. He avoids social situations, and when faced with them, has a difficult time relating to others, such as approaching a woman in a bar and forwardly asking to skip the usual pleasantries and go straight to sex. Unsurprisingly, this approach fails to achieve his goal. Paranoia is also on display on several occasions, seeing people watching him, believing himself to be spied upon, seeing shadowy figures outside his home. He also believed that an object had been implanted into his arm, prompting him to tear his skin apart in order to remove the object, which was never there to begin with.
In the film “ A Beautiful Mind” John Nash experiences a few different positive symptoms. The first of these positive symptoms are seen through the hallucinations John has of having a room -mate while at Princeton. This room- mate continues to stay “in contact” with John through out his adult life and later this room- mate’s niece enters Johns mind as another coinciding hallucination. Nash’s other hallucination is Ed Harris, who plays a government agent that seeks out Nash’s intelligence in the field of code- breaking.
A Beautiful Mind is a film about John Nash, who is a student in graduate school for mathematics at Princeton University. During his time at Princeton he developed the idea of the Nash Equilibrium, a large. Which is not brought back up until later in the film when it wins him the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994. The body of the film consists of John being contacted by a man named William Parcher, who asks for his help in finding the location of a Russian bomb in the United States. However an unexpected conflict arises from working with Mr. Parcher.
A Beautiful Mind tells the true story of Professor John Nash (Russell Crowe), but, while the gross facts may be accurate, one must expect embellishment of the details. It first shows Nash as a student at Princeton in 1947. He is brilliant but erratic - a mathematical genius who lacks social skills. He is aided in making it through those difficult years by his roommate, Charles. Years later, following an astounding breakthrough that revolutionizes economics, John is teaching at M.I.T. and doing code-breaking work for a shady government agent, William Parcher (Ed Harris). It's at this time that John meets, falls in love with, and marries Alicia (Jennifer Connelly). But his happy world soon starts to crumble.