A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind is a movie based on a mathematician, Josh Nash, and his life with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder which affects the coherence of one’s personality due to emotional instability and detachment from reality. The story begins before Nash realized he had the disease and progresses where he and his wife, Alicia, finding a way to manage his condition. The movie provides a lot of information and insight into the psychological condition of schizophrenia, including information on the symptoms, the treatment and cures, and the life for the affected individual and family. The movie is effective at demonstrating the various concepts related to schizophrenia and provides an insight into the disease of schizophrenia.

Throughout the movie, Nash displays many of the key symptoms of schizophrenia. A prime exemplar of this is when Alicia tries to seek treatment for her husband. She had communication issues with Nash since he was not able to speak properly. An inability to communicate is one of the main symptoms of schizophrenia, which takes its toll on interpersonal relationships and intimacy. Leading from that, Nash also experiences these symptoms: hallucinations (he has a roommate but he lives in a single dorm room), delusions (he thinks he work for the government), ideas of reference, poor social skills (mumbles, does not talk much to strangers), awkward gestures and facial expressions, and jumbled speech patterns.

One of the main conceptions of schizophrenia is its effect on the personality, but this is not true. It’s more based on the hallucinations and disordered thinking of an individual. Charles was introduced as Nash’s roommate. He gives Nash valuable advice, most notably to propose to Alicia. Unfortunately, it was found out that Charles was merely a hallucination. However, his advice turned out well for Nash. On the other hand, Parcher was a hallucination opposite to Charles. He encouraged Nash to act in egocentric and self-destructive ways. Both of these are actually aspects of Nash’s own personality. His schizophrenia allowed these figments of his personality to manifest in hallucinations to affect Nash in a more direct way.