Every year, about 42.5 million American Adults suffer from mental illnesses like depression, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia. More and more, mental illness is being shown in media. Some depictions of mental illness are very accurate, informative, and positive, while others can be very negative and are not accurate nor informative. A Beautiful Mind made in 2001, is a movie about a man named John Nash, a mathematical genius who suffers from schizophrenia. The movie is a very good depiction of the disorder and show’s how a man such as him can still develop a mental disorder and shows how much it can take over ones life.
A Beautiful Mind explains the life events of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, John Nash. John Nash was an extremely smart mathematician who worked in a university. In the movie John Nash develops schizophrenia in a later stage of his life. He begins to have both visual and audible hallucinations as well as paranoia, delusional thinking, and a distorted view of reality. His hallucinations begin to take over his life, torturing and haunting him. Because his disorder developed later, his colleagues do not take his behavior serious. But as things worsen they begin to think he is crazy. The disorder begins to make John unable to connect with anyone around him, he beings to isolate himself from his students, colleagues, and family and he starts to lose the ability to determine what is real and what is fake and this starts to ruin his family life and career. Eventually he is forced to have medical treatment. With the help of electric-shock treatment and medication he is able to slowly repair bits and pieces of his life.
In “A Beautiful Mind”, John Nash is affected by Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a long term mental disorder that causes a breakdown in the relation between emotion, behavior, and thought resulting in faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from personal relations and reality, delusions, and a sense of mental fragmentation. Symptoms of disorder include: agitated body movements, trouble organizing thoughts, audible hallucinations, visual hallucinations, delusions, trouble having fun, trouble paying attention, problems using information to make a decision, irritability, isolation, and trouble sleeping.The disorder affects about 3.2 million Americans (mentalhelp.net). Schizophrenia tends to hit young males the hardest, which also means a higher rate of hospitalization between the ages of 15 to 40. But first, in order to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, you must meet these DSM 5 criteria: you must experience two or more of the symptoms I talked about earlier, failure to achieve academic or occupational functioning and continuous signs of disturbance persisted for at least six months.Treatment for Schizophrenia consists of; Medication like antipsychotics, which are suppose to control the symptoms by affecting the brain neurotransmitters dopamine and serotonin, psychosocial intervention which is things like individual therapy where they learn to cope with stress, social skill therapy which focuses on improving communication and social interactions, family therapy, and electro-shock therapy. So far, it has been shown that not just one type of treatment helps but a mixture of medication and therapy has been the most successful.
A Beautiful Mind is a very accurate and positive depiction of someone with a severe case of schizophrenia. The movie is very accurate because it show’s all the aspects of the symptoms for the disorder. Starting with the visual and audible hallucinations, throughout the entire movie John experiences situations where he is interacting with people that are not there. An example of this is when he first goes to his dorm in the beginning of the movie and he thinks he has a roommate but the man isn’t real, he is just an hallucination and he imagines that he is real throughout the entire movie in till he starts his treatment. As well as the hallucination of his roommate, he meets a series of other people that are only a figment of his imagination. John also experiences paranoia, throughout the movie, he believes that people are after him and trying to take him away. In a scene John is in a car with a man he thinks is real and believes that someone is following their car and shooting at it, which also plays along with him being very delusional because none of these things actually happened. Along with being delusional, he gets into many verbal and physical fights with the people that he has created, those also play along with another symptom, inappropriate actions. Another example of inappropriate actions, is when he left his son in the bathtub alone because he began to hallucinate. This movie is very accurate because it does not show just one small symptom of the disorder that could be caused because of other things, the movie shows how he experiences many of the symptoms and shows how that began to affect all aspects of his life. The movie is a positive depiction of schizophrenia because though it does show some of the harsh things he did, the film did not stereotype the disorder to a specific type of person. Because John was very successful and smart and appeared to be very happy in the beginning, it goes to show that the disorder can affect anyone, it doesn't matter what race, gender, how smart you are, or how happy, mental disorders are universal and have the ability to affect anyone. The movie also showed how effective treatment could be, how it doesn’t make it go away but how he learned to cope with it and how he learned to ignore the hallucinations and how he started to patch up things in his life. A Beautiful Mind is an excellent depiction of schizophrenia and has done a great job showing the reality of schizophrenia.
