Phychotic Disorders in the Beautiful Mind Movie - Essay Example

? A Beautiful Mind A brilliant mathematician, a gifted economist, a Carnegie Scholarship recipient, a Nobel Prize winner, a husband, father, , and a man struggling with paranoid schizophrenia: this is John Forbes Nash, Jr. When we first meet John Nash in the movie A Beautiful Mind, we see that he is socially awkward, doesn’t have many friends and is obsessed with finding his ‘original idea’. He is at Princeton University, but rather than go to any classes, or try to network with his peers, he spends his time obsessing about the pecking behaviors of pigeons, finding mathematical oddities in a tie, or scribbling formulae on his dormitory window. He appears nervous, worried, stressed, and altogether odd. His peers at first find him comical, but as the movie progresses, they begin to accept his oddities, even if they initially don’t understand their cause. The audience is not privy to the seriousness of the matter, either, we are expected to believe that here is a man who is so brilliant that he has to have some deficit, and his is purely social. As with a lot of schizophrenics, John Nash’s symptoms seem to peak when he is under a lot of stress. It’s not shocking, then, that in the quest for his ‘original idea’ his delusions and hallucinations start at full force. John’s first hallucination takes the shape of Charles Herman, who is his roommate, friend and confidant. Though we rarely see them in public together, Charles does manifest in several scenes when other people are present, though only John knows he’s around. At the bar, for example, we see John looking for Charles who is in a doorway (Scene 4), John is looking for social help, or so it seems, John seems far calmer when Charles is around than when he’s not. In the same scene, John and Charles play a game of pool together, though his peers, upon seeing the spectacle, chalk it up to one of John’s ‘funny’ ways. Of course he’d play pool with himself, and then he could busy himself with mathematical certainties or uncertainties instead of being social among his friends. Charles stays with John until he is an old man, though by sheer will, John has learnt to ignore him and the other hallucinations, though they are always waiting in the wings, should he choose to let them back into his life. When John starts working and is called to the Pentagon to exercise his beautiful mind with a code breaking assignment, we are introduced to the next hallucination, in the shape of William Parcher, who is just out of the line of sight of all of the other workers in the Pentagon. With this hallucination come some of John’s biggest delusions as well. Parcher is insistent on the micro chipping of John for special, confidential work, shows him secret nerve centers set up in seemingly deserted buildings, and is the one who starts John into his obsessive need to search magazines and newspapers for secret codes (Scene 8). John repeatedly goes to (as we find out later) an abandoned house to gain access to the drop zone, and uses his micro chip, with it’s ever changing codes to get into the super secret location. One of the biggest delusions John has is at this time when he ‘sees’ Parcher speed up to the house, he’s been watching him, John gets into his car and the chase ensues, complete with shots fired (Scene 12). They must be real, they’re shooting at him and they want his information. He has it so firmly in his mind that Parcher is real and his work was being used for the good of his country that he was the one hallucination that was the hardest to shake. Marcee is Charles’ niece and she is yet another hallucination that John has throughout his life. She is a sweet little girl who loves her ‘Uncle’ John and would look despairingly at him when he later tried to ignore her presence. I believe she is the comfort that John is seeking in his life; she always appears whenever he is in need of a hug or a kind word. She is the hallucination that makes John realize that perhaps it is all in his mind after all, as she never seems to get old. With a child, surely the years would leave their mark, but with Marcee this just isn’t the case. This realization comes to the fore after a very wild scene in which all of the hallucinations are present ad the same time, taunting him, talking to him, and getting increasingly angry with him over their ‘realness’, (Scene 16). He finally snaps and the recovery can commence. The other side of schizophrenia deals with the emotional and interpersonal deficits that the sufferer must endure. John is repeatedly shown to be socially awkward. At the mixer in the second scene, John could have simply gone up to his peers and introduced himself, but instead he bumbles around and comes up with a negative approach like “there could be a mathematical explanation for how bad your tie is” (Scene 2). He then goes on to insult Martin Hansen’s published work, having only just been introduced to the man. The other men just laugh, nervously, but it shows just how terrible at social interaction John really is. John says repeatedly that he doesn’t like people and they don’t like him, either, and he seems to be happy with his “lone wolf” persona. Even when his friends are trying to attract the female attention in the bar, he manages to get slapped when he doesn’t use any of the tried and true tricks to lure his ‘prey’, he simply, and as politely as he can gets straight to the point about having sexual relations with her as soon as possible (Scene 4). His friends just laugh it off, but I believe he honestly thought straight and to the point would be what worked; after all, that’s what works in the world of mathematics. John’s social awkwardness stays with him throughout his life, he gets nervous very quickly and acts aloof and like he’s not listening, such as at the Governor’s house when his future wife, Alicia is trying to tell him things about herself and he seems to be in a world of his own. We find out later in the restaurant that he was actually paying attention in his own way, as Alicia accepts his awkward and overly simple proposal of marriage, even though she prefaced it by saying she would have to “redefine her girlish notions of romance”(Scene 11). We see that she didn’t quite get the romantic proposal that she was dreaming of, but is shows that she understood his social inadequacies and his emotional deficits enough to accept anyway. Throughout the movie, Alicia was there to help him out in social circumstances to keep up appearances for the both of them. This movie is a Hollywood retelling of a real man’s life. It differs from his real life in some aspects, but strictly going by the movie, I do believe that they are implying that a person can fully recover from schizophrenia. They show John not complying with his medication, instead placing them in a tin when Alicia isn’t looking. (Scene 16) His delusions and hallucinations get worse of course, when he does this and he is unable to work because of it. Only after he realizes that the doctors are right and that Charles, Parcher and Marcee are in his head can he start ignoring them and working to eradicate them from his mind. The three are always with him, however, just waiting on the sidelines, should he resort to believing that they are real once more, and it takes a long time and a lot of slip ups before he can truly ignore them completely. The movie would have us believe that because he’s not taking the medication, his mind can once again focus on what it does best, he can return to work and he can (using just the power of his mind) simply ignore the hallucinations that plagued him. With the medications, he was forced into a life that wasn’t his own, his mind didn’t work the way he needed it to to be the brilliant mathematician that he was known for. Also with the medications, the hallucinations stopped, but it was not who he was, to get back to who he was, he needed a clear head and an iron will to force his hallucinations to the sidelines. Because they say in the movie that stress triggers his schizophrenic episodes or makes them worse, I believe that part of his recovery was also Alicia’s insistence to get him back to work, but at a familiar University, surrounded by people he’d known all of his adult life. They already understood his deficits and could work with others to keep the order around John that he needed. Social interaction, even if it was the John Nash variety helped in his recovery as well, and I believe that him finally going to a class, though in scene 3 he had said going to classes “dull your mind”, and his wanting to help young Toby all helped him to recover and kept his mind focused on his work, and not his illness. He was needed again, and even late into his life, he found teaching was a way to give back, even though at the beginning of his career, he said that teaching would be not only a waste of student’s time, but of his as well (Scene 7). I believe that he realized that his teachings were valuable and that his life’s work was valuable and that further staved off his three ‘friends’ who were constantly at his side. When John Nash received the Nobel Prize in 1994, he said that he had found the “most important discovery of my life is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logical reasons can be found”. I don’t believe that John Nash could have recovered as much as he did without the love and devotion of his wife, Alicia. She was the one who sought treatment for him in the first place and she was the one instrumental in getting him to see that his hallucinations were not real and he alone could conquer them if he just tried hard enough. She was constantly by his side, trying to make him see what everyone else saw as fact, and found him help at the hands of his friends whenever she could. Alicia took a lot of John’s idiosyncrasies with a grain of salt and would be there to lend a hand in situations that she knew would be stressful to him. She had to be vigilant all the time in case he had any slips in his progression toward health and she found out each time he was slipping, such as the code breaking in the shed, (Scene 16) and got him to re-focus his efforts on getting well. She was a very strong woman and did more than a lot of others would have done in the circumstances, but she loved him. Love can conquer all and this movie certainly shows us that. Whether people not depicted in a Hollywood award-winning film fare as well isn’t for certain, but I believe that given the love and support from their loved ones in concert with therapy and medication, those dealing with schizophrenia can have a better life. Read More