Virtually everyone experiences anxiety, a slight case of depression, or an occasional obsessive thought every once in a while. When these tendencies become excessive and interfere with normal functioning, then an individual is likely to be diagnosed with a mental disorder. The 2001 film “A Beautiful Mind” uses a good mix of emotional and visual themes to express the pain and suffering experienced by people living with a mental disease. The film tells the story of a brilliant mathematician, John Forbes Nash, played by Russel Crow, who has paranoid schizophrenia. The movie was inspired by a bestselling 1988 book of the same name written by Sylvia Nassar. The movie starts at a point where Nash is unaware that he has schizophrenia and he and his wife attempt to tame his condition. This film has a lot of information in describing the symptoms of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a mental condition that affects several aspects of emotion, thinking, and behavior. Roughly 1.1% of the U.S population suffers from schizophrenia (Myers, 2011). This mental disease is thought to be the result of a combination of developmental, biochemical, genetic, and environmental factors. The DSM- IV details five subtypes of schizophrenia: catatonic type, undifferentiated type, disorganized type, paranoid type, and residual type, (Myers, 2011). Furthermore, the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia according to the DSM-5 are disorganized speech, delusions, hallucinations, catatonic or grossly disorganized behavior, and negative symptoms such as avolition, affective flattening, or alogia. Individuals with schizophrenia can either experience negative or positive symptoms. Patients with negative symptoms usually have rigid bodies, toneless voices, expressionless faces, and quiet. The positive symptoms of this condition are inappropriate tears and laughter, delusions, speech disorganization, and hallucinations. The positive symptoms often propel inappropriate behaviors while negative symptoms govern the absence of appropriate behavior.
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People with schizophrenia in many cases are usually thrust to a world that bears little resemblance to day-to-day experience. John Nash portrays symptoms of Schizophrenia from the moment he arrives at Princeton University. For instance, he exhibits signs of paranoia while in class when he observes men outside stalking him. Up to now, Nash is still not aware that he has a mental disease. However, this hints to the possibility that he might be having paranoid schizophrenia. This subtype of schizophrenia is characterized predominantly by hallucinations and delusions (Kring, 2017). Individuals often exhibit unaffected mood and cognitive functions. Paranoid schizophrenia is considered the most common subtype of this chronic disorder. In Princeton, he meets new friends and some fellow Carnegie scholarship receivers, but Nash has problems communicating with them. He would rather deal with numbers than be around people. For this reason, Nash spends most of his time attempting to discover revolutionary mathematical equations. His inability to communicate negatively impacts interpersonal relationships and intimacy. Nash’s roommate, Charles Herman becomes his closest friend and accompanies him almost everywhere. However, halfway through the film, it becomes evident that most of the situations and places that Nash visits are only illusions. For instance, Charles Hermann turns out to be the first imaginary character that Nash developed in his mind.
Nash would also humorously ask his friends and colleagues whether they too could see their new visitors. This was his way of checking for reality. In fact, Nash’s primary problem was the inability to separate reality from his delusions. He also experiences disturbances in sense perception through hallucinations. Nash's delusions become apparent when his mind make up personalities that he relates to closely. For instance, William Parcher becomes the third person Nash makes up, and he firmly believes that this man is part of a secret government operation and even assists him in accomplishing his missions. At one point in the film, Nash helps Parcher to locate and stop a Russian nuclear bomb. This becomes the second situation that he conceives within his mind, and is not aware that it does not exist.
Nash's delusions were not consciously created. Instead, according to Benjamin Libet, they began 350 milliseconds before he actually experienced them (Carter, 2011). Three hundred and fifty milliseconds is the time interval between the beginning of brain activity and conscious awareness. In Libet’s study, participants were asked to press a button as they noted the position of a dot on a computer screen, which changed its position every forty-three milliseconds. The instant the subjects pressed the button or the time they thought the button was pressed marked the time of conscious awareness. Furthermore, Libet noted the start of motor neuron activity in his subject's brains. He observed that awareness happened 350 milliseconds after motor activity started. This shows that Nash was merely witnessing the events that occurred in his mind. Therefore, Nash's Real "I" had to understand that a delusional state of mind was in control if he were ever to heal himself. The Real "I' can be considered as one of the subconscious bits of intelligence that offer competing strategies in a person's life. Nash suffers more because his emotions generate vibrant delusions that take frequent control of his system.
Patients with less severe symptoms of schizophrenia often undergo psychosocial treatment. This therapeutic approach enables patients to improve their social functioning, at the hospital, at home, at work, and in the community. This therapy is particularly important for patients between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five because these ages are the crucial career years of life. This kind of treatment is also essential for those who wish to rejoin society again seeing as patients with schizophrenia often experience difficulties in self-care, communication, and maintaining relationships.
Patients with schizophrenia undergo non-medical interventions in the form of rehabilitation. Certain programs are designed to assist patients with vocational training, financial management, social skills, public transportation, and job training. All these programs are meant to allow patients to return to their original self and to improve their functioning within society. The most effective form of psychotherapy used to treat psychological problems is cognitive behavioral psychotherapy. Cognitive therapy educates people on new, more adaptive ways of acting and thinking. Cognitive therapy is usually combined with behavioral therapy in order to aid patients in performing efficiently in life by diminishing the symptoms and focusing on the fundamental aspects of life. The film demonstrates a kind of treatment that takes different approaches. At the psychiatric hospital, Nash received antipsychotic medications. Furthermore, Nash underwent insulin shock therapy towards the middle of the movie.
This film also highlights the plight that family members and friends of an individual suffering from a mental disease have to experience. Nash's wife, Alicia suffers all the difficulties that her husband goes through. She stands by him and attempts to show him that he is experiencing hallucinations and delusions, but Nash gets upset that his own wife would doubt his sanity. Suffering from schizophrenia is a massive challenge since an individual view everything in the same way a healthy brain does. It can be difficult to believe that things do not exist since they appear to be so real. Nash continues to avoid his wife who regardless stands by him to assist him in overcoming his illness. Nash experiences the first conflict between delusions and reality when Alicia confronts him with unopened documents from the mailbox proving that he was depositing his "top secret" reports uncovering a Soviet plot in their regular mailbox. This evidence allowed Nash to realize that he was hallucinating.
Nash puts his family in danger when he stops taking the antipsychotic medications that were prescribed by his psychiatrist, Rozen. His hallucinations return as a result of not taking the medication. In one instance, Nash hallucinates that Charles is watching his baby and thus unintentionally harms his baby as she remains unsupervised. This incident changes the balance of power in Nash’s mind. He suddenly faces the possibility of being admitted to a mental institution permanently. Nash steps in front of Alicia’s car to stop her from leaving him. A sudden insight appears to heal him permanently at this critical moment. People often take a look at themselves after they encounter a traumatic event that has been triggered by emotionally negative behaviors (Carter, 2011). For instance, an alcoholic will only submit and seek treatment after admitting that he or she has a problem. Nash would have potentially experienced a speedy recovering if he had been administered with emotional intelligence and self-awareness therapies.
Russell Crowe’s “A Beautiful Mind” offers valuable lessons for the practice of self-awareness by ordinary people. Even though the film does not portray the details of Nash's life accurately, it depicts his disorder quite well. It supplants visual delusions with auditory symptoms to tell the story of John Forbes Nash a Nobel Laureate in Economics who develops paranoid schizophrenia. This illness was intensified by the anxiety he felt due to the pain suffered his friends and wife as a result of his mental state. Although the medication he was prescribed suppressed the symptoms, he was only able to return to his normal life after he became self-aware. The psychological symptoms visually depicted in the film efficiently communicates the impediments to differentiating subconscious patterns within the mind.
References
Carter, D. J. (2011). Case Study: A Structural Model for Schizophrenia and Family
Collaboration. Clinical Case Studies, 10, 2, 147-158.
Myers, D. G. (2011). Exploring psychology: Eighth edition in modules . Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Kring, A. M., Johnson, S. L., Davison, G. C., & Neale, J. M. (2017). Abnormal psychology . Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
