A Beautful Mind
Mental illness is a disorder of the brain that results in a disruption of a person’s thinking, feeling, mood, and ability to relate to others. For someone who’s never had a mental illness, it may be hard to imagine what life would be like for someone who does. The film “A Beautiful Mind” is about a mathematician, John Nash, who suffers from schizophrenia. Through his anguish, we gain knowledge of a life with mental illness. It affects every component of your life, and the lives of those close to you.
The film opens in the late 1940s at Princeton, where John Nash is a young graduate student in mathematics. There Nash does some brilliant original work, but its importance is not immediately widely recognized. His best friend is his roommate, Charles Herman (fictional). In the early 1950s Nash takes a job at M.I.T. that involves both working at the (fictional) Wheeler Defense Labs and teaching classes. He believes he is a spy for the CIA and William Parcher (fictional) is his superior. At M.I.T. he falls in love with and marries a physics student named Alicia Larde. However, Nash's behavior becomes increasingly bizarre, and he is diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. With Alicia's help, he battles mental illness for many years, and eventually recovers sufficiently to live a more or less normal life. Meanwhile, the importance of the work he did four decades earlier receives wide recognition, and in 1994 Nash is awarded a Nobel Prize.
The Turmoil that John Nash feels in the movie is not unlike the feelings many people go through. My experience with mental illness has recently expanded. A good friend was admitted to a psychiatric hospital with borderline personality disorder. I visited her and now have a better understanding of mental ailments. I was scared to go to the hospital. I had visions of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, but my fear was irrational. No one fit the stigma of “crazy”. They were people trying to help themselves. The hospital is a safe environment to take a break from the stresses of life that can be even more detrimental to a person with a mental disorder. The hospital can also help psychiatrists’ correct medication with constant supervision of the patient.
Like John Nash, my cousin Peter is schizophrenic. I’ve only heard stories of his erratic behavior and paranoia, but I know that he loves his...