A Beautiful Mind

Mental illness is a disorder of the brain that results in a disruption of a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, and ability to relate to others. For someone who’s never had a mental illness, it may be hard to imagine what life would be like for someone who does. I chose the movie A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe. A Beautiful Mind is based on the life of John Forbes Nash Jr., who was a mathematical genius who made a great discovery while attending Princeton. Nash is then sidetracked by many problems, but fights back and eventually prevails in the end. The movie leads the viewer on to believe that Nash’s visions are real. Later we discover that Nash is diagnosed as a schizophrenic or paranoid schizophrenic. Through his anguish, we gain knowledge of a life with mental illness. It affects every component of your life, and the lives of those close to you.

The film opens in the late 1940s at Princeton, where John Nash is a young graduate student in mathematics. There, Nash does some brilliant original work, but its importance is not immediately widely recognized. His best friend is his roommate, Charles Herman (fictional). In the early 1950s Nash takes a job at M.I.T. that involves both working at the (fictional) Wheeler Defense Labs and teaching classes. He believes he is a spy for the CIA and William Parcher (fictional) is his superior. At M.I.T. he falls in love with and marries a physics student named Alicia Larde. However, Nash's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, and he is diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. With Alicia's help, he battles mental illness for many years, and eventually recovers sufficiently to live a more or less normal life. Meanwhile, the importance of the work he did four decades earlier receives wide recognition, and in 1994 Nash is awarded a Nobel Prize. Nash's experiences, including the timing of his illness' onset during his early adulthood, the withdrawal and reduced thinking capacity that it brought, and his failure to get much relief from many medications, make him a typical schizophrenic, though his intellect was far from typical. Even still, the disease knocked many points off Nash's IQ.

The Turmoil that John Nash feels in the movie is not unlike the feelings many people go through. People suffering with psychiatric conditions are stereo typically viewed as crazy and dangerous. Everyone is affected by mental illness, not only the sick and their loves ones. People who label the mentally ill as “crazy” affects those patients negatively, making it harder for them to seek help. This is highlighted in “A Beautiful Mind” with the students’ looks of disgust when John is taken to the mental institution. He is ashamed to even show his face at the school for years. When he does return he is mocked by the students for his strange behavior.

Mental illness not only affects the physical body, but if affects the mind as well. You may believe things that aren't true, or you may have feelings or despair and suicide. Imagine that you couldn't even trust your own thoughts and feelings. A Beautiful Mind accurately portrays schizophrenia by the descriptions given in the textbook and in my book. There are four types of schizophrenia which are paranoid, disorganized, catatonic, and undifferentiated. In the movie, the doctor explains to John’s wife that his ways and actions are accepted in his world. The cause of schizophrenia is due to a number of contributing factors. Nash believed that he was working for the U.S government. Like Nash, most schizophrenics experience three kinds of symptoms, often in differing severity and patterns throughout their lives. "Positive" symptoms, named for their effect of creating new perceptions in the brain, include bizarre, delusional beliefs, as well as hallucinations and auspiciousness. "Negative" symptoms, which stem from alterations in normal brain activity, include blunted emotion and motivation, reduced ability to experience pleasure, and social withdrawal. And "cognitive", or intellectual, symptoms reduce a person's ability to process complex information or plan actions.

Symptoms of schizophrenia include an excess or distortion of normal functions, such as a hallucination. According to the textbook, schizophrenia occurs in about 1 in 100 people worldwide. It can sometimes be impossible to distinguish fantasy from reality with a mental illness. This is prominent in the movie. John’s schizophrenia creates an alternate reality in his mind. He was faced with the realization that people and memories that were vivid to him never really existed. This comprehension is hard to accept, and John drifts back to his old habits.

It is not exactly known how mental illness occurs. There is evidence supporting the cause as genetic, but there is also evidence that it comes from the environment as well as social perspectives. Sometimes all three are factors. If your family has a history of schizophrenia, you are more likely to suffer from the affliction. You could also be the only person you know that has schizophrenia. Science shows that sometimes illness is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. Medication can be helpful, but finding the right drug, dose, and combination can take years. Therapy is also very useful in the healing process. Patients need to understand, as in John Nash’s case, not everything they know and feel is true. Issues may have stemmed from something in their past. These environmental factors should be worked out by professionals for maximum recovery.

In the film, what truly saves John is Alicia’s love for him. John Nash is arrogant when we first meet him. He’s rude, narcissistic, and believes he is intellectually superior. Only when John meets Alicia do we begin to see his true colors. His caring and compassion becomes apparent. John overcoming schizophrenia can be viewed as heroic, but I believe that Alicia is the heroine of this story. Without her love and devotion, John may never have recovered from his illness. It took much strength and courage to stand by him in those trying and sometimes scary times. Alicia is not narcissistic; she is optimistic. Alicia never lost faith in her husband. John’s illness affects Alicia as much as it does him. Watching her husband suffer is as if she’s enduring it herself. We see this when John receives his first electric shock therapy. Alicia can’t even watch the treatment. Losing him to sickness means losing a part of her. In this way they are interdependent. John’s schizophrenia also alienates him from his wife. When he gets home from the hospital it’s obvious that there’s distance between them. John doesn't talk about his feelings with Alicia. Maybe he thinks she won’t understand, or he may just be embarrassed. Alicia is therefore also alienated because she is being left out her husband’s life.

The film also discusses humanity. John is the most human character in the film because we view mostly his thoughts and feelings. We see his weaknesses, fears, and flaws. Seen also is his love, and eventually, his good nature. The struggle John faces with his illness is arduous but true to life. Everyday, people struggle with anxiety, phobias, and physical disease. This is life. We see the film through John’s eyes and can therefore, sympathize with him.

As Nash's story illustrates, psychiatrists have struggled for decades to find treatments that can lessen schizophrenia's symptoms, even while they search for the root causes in the brain's chemistry. Different medications and social support strategies have come into use - and fallen out of it - over the years. More are now in development or in clinical trials. With proper help, many schizophrenics can perform well mentally and socially, and even be productive at work. Despite myths that say otherwise, these are humans, capable of functioning and contributing. There are limits to their ability to lead lives as full as others, but they are able to have relationships and live with their disability.

Still, many schizophrenics still get imperfect help from current treatments, or go undiagnosed or untreated - raising the risk of permanent brain damage that could have been prevented with early intervention. Others can't get proper psycho-social services due to insurance limits.

The movie's depiction of Princeton professor and Nobel Prize winner John Nash may not be exactly medically up-to-date, but its presentation of a schizophrenic, who is able to work and have relationships, and get help from medications and social support, is ground-breaking. A Beautiful Mind is a powerful and influential film that will and should be used in psychiatric education. The best audiences may be patients, families, and the general public, who will get an outstanding introduction to schizophrenia: its symptoms, course, treatments, and complications. The film may also be recommended for patients struggling with discouragement about recovery. This "video-therapy," as a self-help psycho-educational tool, can have substantial benefits. Moreover, A Beautiful Mind can show how delusions develop, how patients could believe such thoughts to be true, and how such symptoms can devastate their lives and the lives of their family and friends.

Film can be especially helpful in teaching about schizophrenia because it exposes a variety of audience types and sizes to the relatively unfamiliar phenomenology of schizophrenia. Although many people have experienced effective symptoms such as depression or anxiety to some degree, thought and perception disturbances, such as schizophrenia, may be harder for the average person to understand. Compared to clinical interviews, film portrayals of schizophrenia may be easier to obtain, more anonymous, and more illustrative of active symptoms.

Finally, dramatically edited commercial films, often with enhanced audiovisual special effects, may provide a more complete, concise, and memorable "virtual" window into the world of psychosis, an often emotional experience that most people might otherwise never have.

I personally believe we are at the very beginning of having a true understanding of schizophrenia and its symptoms. Yet, quite the opposite is true, as scientists increasingly focus on biological aspects like neurotransmitters and genes. Diagnosis is actually done by seeing if medication works or not !