Schizophrenia: A Beautiful Mind

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by both positive and negative symptoms. Positive symptoms may include hallucinations, delusions, and irrational beliefs. Negative symptoms may include a lack of affect, social withdrawal, and depression (“Schizophrenia,” 2016). Dissociative identity disorder is a highly controversial diagnosis which involves individuals dissociating or separating aspects of themselves into different personalities (Gillig, 2009). Unlike schizophrenia, however, the individual is not delusional, and is apparently responding to some form of concrete trauma in his or her life. As seen in the film A Beautiful Mind, schizophrenia is not necessarily triggered by a specific, traumatic incident in the individual’s life, although it does often arise during times of trauma and transition during an adolescent’s life, such as when Nash was going to graduate school at Princeton.

Although Nash had a brilliant early career as a mathematician, eventually cumulating in the development of game theory (for which he won a Noble Prize), his previous eccentricities gradually became more and more extreme. He believed he was being persecuted by the government. The film depicts Nash’s delusions at first as if they were real. Then, the film shows how many of the figures Nash sees exist only in his head, and the reality of the associations he perceives are the result of his dissociation from reality.

Over the course of the film, Nash is subjected to a variety of treatments, including the no-longer-used insulin theory, and there are various attempts to psychoanalyze his condition and connect it to childhood events. He grows violent at times, even to his wife, again largely the result of his delusions. Finally, Nash experienced a spontaneous remission of his symptoms with age, and became lucid enough once again to lead a normal life. This does not happen with all sufferers of schizophrenia, however.

References

Gillig P. M. (2009). Dissociative identity disorder: A controversial diagnosis. Psychiatry, 6(3), 24–29. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2719457/

Schizophrenia. (2016). National Institute of Mental Health. Retrieved from: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/schizophrenia/index.shtml