John Forbes Nash Jr.: Schizophrenia Analysis

John Forbes Nash, Jr. (Russell Crowe in the film) is a child prodigy. While other boys his age were playing childhood games, John is reading and studying E.T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics. Learning more at home than he would at school, the young boy is able to solve some of math’s most difficult problems. Studying at Princeton University, Nash is undaunted by other brilliant students and professors. At twenty-one, he writes a doctoral thesis which eventually makes him a Nobel Laureate. Falling in love with Alicia Larde (In the Film Jennifer Connelly), one of his graduate students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John Nash marries and quickly has a son, John Charles Martin Nash. The family's world, sadly, has already fallen apart. John

2010. 13-6c). Statistics show about 1 in 100 people could develop it. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, more than 2 million Americans suffer from schizophrenia in any given year. Of those people, only one in five recovers completely. Remission, when it occurs, follows a lengthy treatment time (NIMH.NIH.gov 2014). Symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, and social withdrawal. Most people with schizophrenia continue to suffer chronically or episodically throughout their lives. Even between bouts of active illness, lost opportunities for careers and relationships, stigma, residual symptoms, and medication side effects often plague those with the illness. One of every 10 people with schizophrenia eventually commits suicide (Pastorino, E., & Portillo, S. (2010). 13-6b).
Schizophrenics often suffer from memory loss. In a recent study, five healthy individuals were asked to perform the same memory task which five patients with schizophrenia performed. Results clearly demonstrate that "patients with schizophrenia do not generate the dramatic brain activity in the circuits of the brain critical to the memory task.” (Pastorino, E., & Portillo, S. (2013).