A Beautiful Mind Paper

For our third writing assignment, I chose the movie A Beautiful Mind based on the real life story of the mathematician Professor John Nash, the Nobel Memorial Prize Laureate in Economic Sciences 1994. While the definition for a psychological disorder is a collections of symptoms marked by a “clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation or behavior”(American Psychiatric Association, 2013), the more reliable method to distinguish “abnormality” from normality is to determine whether these dysfunctional thoughts, emotions or behaviors are maladaptive, in other words, whether they interfere with normal day-to-day life (Psychology). By that standard, Prof. John Nash is, without doubt, considered as “abnormal”

John Nash experienced some elaborate visual hallucinations, which includes seeing people like Charles, Marcee, and Parcher whom doesn’t exist in the first place. In his hallucinations, Prof. John Nash believed that he was being followed when he delivered his research findings to the secret mailbox. In addition to that, while giving a guest lecture at Harvard University, he tried and fled the class suspecting that he was being tailed by some Russian agents. Things got way out of hand when Prof. John Nash trusted his baby with his imaginary friend, Charles when Alicia (Prof. John Nash’s wife) rushed into the house to find their infant submerged in the tub. Just when you think the situation can’t get any worse, Prof. John Nash pushed both Alicia and the baby to the ground in his attempt to save Alicia from Parcher, who only existed in his imagination. Having considered the typical symptoms and behaviors of schizophrenia, I believed that Prof. John Nash’s portrayal in the movie is far from the literal telling. The hallucinations that Prof. John Nash experienced in the movie are too organized for a schizophrenia patient. It almost seemed like someone is having a lucid

While he was living all by himself all-the-time, Prof. John Nash thought that he was sharing a room with his phantom roommate Charles, a literature student. However, his condition only started to get a lot worse when he started to work for Pentagon to crack encrypted enemy telecommunication, which got him into his obsession of searching hidden patterns in magazines and newspapers for Soviet’s plot. Throughout the course of the movie, Prof. John Nash was treated with insulin shock therapy and also drug therapy, in specific — antipsychotic medication. Also, it was due to his decision to secretly stopped taking the medication (due to the strong side-effect of these medications that causes tremors and lethargic) that put him into the relapse. Prof. John Nash’s disorder almost killed in his baby, period — (again) when he entrusted his baby with Charles. Also, like most Hollywood movies with a good dose of magic, the movie portrayed Alicia and John’s relationship like the true love story, where Alicia sticked with John through thick and thin. However, I believed that dealing with a true schizophrenia patient is way more complicated than what we saw in the movie. Having watched the movie, I think that it would be incredibly tough to live life as a schizophrenia