¶ … Beautiful Mind

What psych. disorder was illustrated? Did the person meet criteria for "abnormal"?

The film "A Beautiful Mind," starring Russell Crowe and directed by Ron Howard, is a biographical film depicting the life and career of the Nobel-prize winning mathematician John Nash. In addition to being a mathmacial genius, and the founder of game theory, which has proved influential and invaluable to understanding economics, Nash also suffered from paranoid scitzophrenia.

To what extent did you believe this was a realistic portrayal?

Nash's delusions, like many schizophrenics, began in young adulthood, after a traumatic life change, in his case moving to Princeton to become a graduate student. Nash was always eccentric, but at Princeton he began to hallucinate individuals who were not real, and communicated to him that others could not see. Later, he began to unwind further, even while a professor at MIT, believing that government agents were sending him secret messages through coded newspaper articles. The sense of persecution and the idea that the world is full of signs only observable to the schizophrenic is realistic, although the concrete nature of Nash's hallucinations makes his world seem more real to an observer, and less flexible and perhaps disorganized than it might be to an actual sufferer in real life.

Which aspects of the film were realistic and which were not and how could it have been better?

The suffering caused by Nash's illness to his wife are certainly realistic, as is the preoccupation with government survellience typical of many paranoid delusions. Even Nash's recovery, while atypical of the disorder, is based in real life. However, the relatively coherent nature of his mental world gives the illness a veracity for the viewer, which is seldom true of the way other people perceive paranoid schizophrenic's delusions in real life -- although the coherent characters of the film react in a horrified, realistic fashion.

Were any causal factors for the chacters disorder suggested?

There is no

5.)What types of treatment given, if any? Give examples. Do you think this form is typical for individuals with this disorder? Why/why not?

6.)What impact did the person's disorder have on others in his life? Realistically portrayed? Why/why not?