Psychology

In The Case of Dr. John Nash in the Movie
A Beautiful Mind

John Forbes Nash, Jr. was born on June 13, 1928. He is an American physicist and mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations challenged  Adam Smith  Economics, which states that the best result comes from everyone in the group doing what is best for himself. John Nash s Theory of Governing Dynamics would later completely revise this theory, which had been followed by Economists for over 150 years. The film begins in the year 1948. His work allows for everyday students of, for example, multi-variable calculus, to explain complex mathematical systems they encounter in their daily lives. His theories are used in economics, computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting and military theory. He served as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton and in 1994 became a Nobel Laureate for his work on Complex Partial Differential Equations and Economic Sciences. Dr. Nash is the subject of the Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind. The film was based on a book of the same name, though the film took some serious liberties with the truth of what Dr. Nash struggled with ever since his early twenties--the disease paranoid schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is not , as popular culture sometimes suggests, a  split  or  multiple personality  which is actually called Dissociative Identity Disorder. Instead, Schizophrenia is a psychosis that is marked by a fragmentation of basic psychological functions--attention, perception, thought, emotion, and behavior--that are normally integrated so that people can adjust to the demands of reality. People with schizophenia misperceive what is happening around them, often hearing or seeing things that aren t there. They have trouble maintaining attention to what is going on around them, and their thinking is often so confused and disorganized that they have difficulty communicating with others. Some people with this disorder display a blunting of emotional feelings and a lack of motivation that leaves them immobile and unresponsive. Or their emotions may be highly inappropriate, which may result in uproarious laughter at events that are not funny, or uncontrollable crying when nothing sad has taken place. Bizarre behavior is another common symptom, sometimes involving an outlandish or disheveled appearance and odd mannerisms. In other cases, the person avoids social contact as much as possible, withdrawing into private fantasy.

In the film A Beautiful Mind, one can see the troubles John Nash has fitting in with the other students from his very first days as a graduate student at Princeton. He sits quietly in the back of a lecture hall filled with other graduate students while a Professor gives an inspiring speech, asking them each,  Which of you will be the next Morse, the next Einstein  And explaining to the gathering that it was Mathematicians who won the war, that it was Mathematicians who broke the Japanese codes, and it was Mathematicians who built The Bomb. Later, as the new students are mingling around, Nash insults a fellow student s  tie as a means of introducing himself. Right from the start, the film demonstrates his difficulty relating to other people. He sits in his room all day, taxing his mind by looking for patterns in random events such as the movements of pigeons fighting over bread crumbs and he also tries to decode newspaper columns, which, he believes, hold some kind of vital information especially meant for him.

Throughout the beginning of the film, Nash is shown to be quite a loner--never attending class, never publishing papers like his peers. His dream of discovering an  Original Idea  that would evolutionize the world of mathematics is repeatedly attacked as being beyond his reach. Early in the movie, Nash begins developing paranoid schizophrenia and endures delusional episodes while painfully watching the loss and burden his condition brings on his wife and friends.

Although he took prescribed medication, Nash wrote later that he only took it under pressure. After 1970 he was never committed to the hospital again and refused any medication. According to Nash, the film A Beautiful Mind inaccurately showed him taking new atypical anti-psychotics during this period. He attributed the depiction to the screenwriter (whose mother, he notes, was a psychiatrist), who was worried about encouraging people with the disorder to stop taking their medication. Others, however, have questioned whether the fabrication obscured a key question as to whether recovery from problems like Nashs can actually be hindered by such drugs, and Nash has said they are overrated and that the adverse effects are not given enough consideration once someone is considered mentally ill. According to his friends, Nash recovered gradually with the passage of time. Encouraged by his then former wife, De Lard, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities were accepted. De Lard said of Nash, its just a question of living a quiet life.

Nash dates the start of what he terms mental disturbances to the early months of 1959 when his wife was pregnant. He has described a process of change from scientific rationality of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who are psychiatrically diagnosed as schizophrenic or paranoid schizophrenic including seeing himself as a messenger or having a special function in some way, and with supporters and opponents and hidden schemers, and a feeling of being persecuted, and looking for signs representing divine revelation. Nash has suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness, and his striving to feel important and be recognized, and to his characteristic way of thinking such that I wouldnt have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally. He has said, If I felt completely pressureless I dont think I would have gone in this pattern. He does not see a categorical distinction between terms such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Nash reports that he did not hear voices until around 1964, later engaging in a process of rejecting them. Nash reports that he was always taken to hospitals against his will, and only temporarily renounced his dream-like delusional hypotheses after being in a hospital long enough to decide to superficially conform, behave normally or experience enforced rationality. Only gradually on his own did he intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced and politically-oriented thinking as a waste of effort. However, by 1995, he felt that although he was thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists, he felt more limited.

A Beautiful Mind opened in US cinemas on December 21, 2001. Although, as is depicted in the film, he took prescribed medication, Nash wrote later that he only took it under pressure. After 1970 he was never committed to the hospital again and refused any medication. According to Nash, the film A Beautiful Mind inaccurately showed him taking new atypical anti-psychotics during this period. He attributed the depiction to the screenwriter (whose mother, he notes, was a psychiatrist), who was worried about encouraging people with the disorder to stop taking their medication. Others, however, have questioned whether the fabrication obscured a key question as to whether recovery from problems like Nashs can actually be hindered by such drugs, and Nash has said they are overrated and that the adverse effects are not given enough consideration once someone is considered mentally ill. According to friends and colleaguesb, Nash recovered gradually with the passage of time. Encouraged by his then former wife, De Lard, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities were accepted. De Lard said of Nash, its just a question of living a quiet life.

Nash dates the start of what he terms mental disturbances to the early months of 1959 when his wife was pregnant. He has described a process of change from scientific rationality of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who are psychiatrically diagnosed as schizophrenic or paranoid schizophrenic including seeing himself as a messenger or having a special function in some way, and with supporters and opponents and hidden schemers, and a feeling of being persecuted, and looking for signs representing divine revelation. Nash has suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness, and his striving to feel important and be recognized, and to his characteristic way of thinking such that I wouldnt have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally. He has said, If I felt completely pressure-less I dont think I would have gone in this pattern. He does not see a categorical distinction between terms such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Nash reports that he did not hear voices until around 1964, later engaging in a process of rejecting them. Nash reports that he was always taken to hospitals against his will, and only temporarily renounced his dream-like delusional hypotheses which had earlier included a  roommate  named Charles Herman, a cute little girl, and a---CIA, Department of Defense, Joint Chiefs of Staff-- black-tie  character who went by the moniker  William Parcher .   After being in a hospital long enough Nash decided to superficially conform, behave normally, or experience enforced rationality. Only gradually, on his own, did he intellectually reject some of his delusionally influenced and politically-oriented thinking as a waste of effort. However, by 1995, Nash felt that although he was thinking rationally again-- in the style that is characteristic of scientists, he felt more limited, as one effect of his psychotic delusions was to de-code complex mathematical expressions and hence, to train his mind to do such calculations automatically.

Many people in the New JerseyPennsylvania region were privileged to actually see and meet the real Dr. John Nash when he spoke before an audience mainly comprised of mentally ill  consumers ---people who have one or more mental illnesses and were receiving treatment for them under the auspices of the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI-PA). He stunned many schizophrenics who had come from all over the region to hear him speak by maintaining the fact that he still found the side-effects of anti-psychotic medication (atypical or otherwise) to be debilitating and  not worth the price  one had to pay for taking them.

Regardless of sideline issues such as this one over medications, an argument that still rages at the center of almost every mental illnesses with inevitable experts on the pro and con sides every time, it is very enlightening and informing to see mental illness through the eyes of someone who has actually lived through it.   Even when this study is within the vehicle of a film, its importance is invaluable for it provides the ability to actally  walk a mile in someone else s shoes .
  
Another  beloved film character in a much different movie, however,  perhaps sums much of this up better.   In the immortal classic by Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird, Atticus Finch tells his young daughter, Scout, that in order to really understand another human being, it is sometimes necessary to  climb into their skin and walk around for awhile .   Never has this been more true than when exploring an illness which no healthy person can ever hope to really comprehend.    John Nash s story, however, helps us realize what a life with hallucinations is like and this is an experience which can only help all us of to be better at kindness, better at compassion, and, maybe best of all, better at reaching a more perfect understanding .not only of others, but of ourselves, as well.