Schizophrenia In John Nash's Hi A Beautiful Mind

John Nash started as a young graduate student who was attending Princeton University at the very beginning of his career, who would then be John Nash, the mathematics Nobel Prize winner. John Nash had late onset schizophrenia that could have been set off by the stress to have come up with his own idea to publish. He had little to no regard to social interaction, little cognitive symptoms were shown until later in life once medicine was taken into account, he had major positive symptoms such as hallucinations (auditory and visual) and delusions ( false belief). Just like in John’s life the hallucinations and delusions seemed very real. We were following his life and what John felt, saw who John saw, and thought what John was doing was ever day “real” life. It wasn’t until very later that we, the audience, would find out that John Nash would have schizophrenia.
His hallucinations of his roommate, “best friend”, his delusion of coding for the government we all very real to him, as well to us. Showing us how real schizophrenia could be a human-being. He was paranoid, scared that the government was listening to his conversations, afraid that he was going to be compromised. While he had paranoid delusion, he was also suffering from a grandiose delusion. He thought that he was the top man that the Russians were after, seeing himself as the most important man on the “job”. 1950’s when John became ill ,was according to “Psychology Today” , “probably the very worst time in the history of American psychiatry to become ill” (Shorter, 2015). This was a time where they were stuck, in regards to psychiatric help, schizophrenia was a “wastebasket diagnosis” (Shorter 2015). How do we know that his diagnosis should be schizophrenia, if they used it as a catch all diagnosis? He may have had many underlying or looked over conditions because of little knowledge or simply wasn’t a known diagnosis then. This movie portrayed John Nash as schizophrenic, but what if that wasn’t the best diagnosis to the knowledge that we have now. With all the technologies that we have now, brain scans, new methods and well-trained psychiatrists may have been able to prescribe things to calm him symptoms down, and make the correct diagnosis sooner which could have made John’s life a little easier. A Beautiful Mind, does about a half and half job displaying schizophrenia in a movie, parts were accurate, but while they did liberty on emphasizing a few things that aren’t necessarily reality for a person who was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
They played on his hallucinations, visually more than auditory, which when someone who has schizophrenia, auditory is the most common hallucination ( Beidel et. al 2014). Another missed representation happened towards the end of the movie. When John wanted to fight for himself, instead of use the antipsychotic medicine. Disorders of such high gravity, like schizophrenia, would be terribly difficult to just push aside and realize that what/who you were “dealing with” was all sudden not real. Something that was portrayed correctly, for someone that doesn’t have any knowledge on schizophrenia, is how real this could be to the human with the diagnosis. We would see these people out in the world and think, “they must be crazy”, but because of this movie we can see a very small fragment of what it must be life to live with this disorder. Also, how real it can really
be. John had a few different treatment methods; hospitalization, electroshock therapy, cigarette smoking, and anti-psychotic medicine. The antipsychotic medication made him groggy, not able to think and articulate his thoughts, couldn’t work on his mathematics, wasn’t allowed to help with their baby either because on the medication it made him unaware. There was also one other self-medication tool along with cigarette smoking. He pushed himself to not pay any mind to his hallucinations which would ultimately make him a high functioning person of society again.