“A Beautiful Mind is a great movie that portrays how mental illness can affect a person” . The character John Nash is very intelligent, and a mathematics genius. He was able to go to graduate college due to his Prize mathematics award that he won. His journey in the movie details how mental illness can affect everything you do. The mental problem manifests him into a different mental state than what he was in the beginning. His illness progresses through the movie, and the illness causes complications in his success in life.
John Nash’s character is not a social person. He does not feel comfortable talking to people. There are a few friends he can talk to that understand him. Even though his communication skills are not that great; he makes up for in numbers. His fascination with the love of numbers, and problems is what he enjoys the most. In John’s mind he is solving mathematical problems, or thinking of other scenarios he can try to answer.
His teaching position that he accepts is in the subject of Calculus. He enjoys his job because he can teach others about numbers and increase the students’ knowledge of mathematical complexity. His communication skills that involve numbers are great, but conversations about anything else is a struggle for him. As a math teacher he is able to express his love of numbers, and put knowledge into his students’ minds.
He had given his class a hard math problem to try and solve to test their minds regarding math. A student Alicia wanted to discuss the problem with him. The two of them felt attraction towards each other. After several months John and his student had fell in love and gotten married. He was able to communicate with his wife, and she understood his passion for numbers. “A while later he was asked to work for the Secret Defense Department to translate and break codes” . John’s genius math ability let him break the codes in his head without writing anything down. The Defense Department was impressed with his ability and technique.
His mental illness started to catch up with him when the Defense gave him a secret job. The job was to find secret messages of a war against the Soviets. John does the work, but is caught up in a situation that involved him getting shot at by the Russian people. His actions become weird, and are not making since. He thinks people are after him when they are not. Alicia becomes worried because her husband is acting crazy, and she talks to a mental hospital about his condition. When the psychiatric people come to take John away; he thinks they are spies trying to kill him.
John then realizes that these scenarios are not real and are hallucinations in his mind. He determines they are not real incidents that are occurring, but an image in his head that he believes is real. The hospital give him anti-psychotic medication to control his mental episodes, and help determine what reality is. When John stops taking his medication he because it interferes with his math capabilities. He begins to start hallucinating again after stopping his medication. His actions are unnormal, and leaves his child unattended in the bathtub which almost caused him to drown in the water. Since he had stopped taking the medicine his psychotic episodes had returned. John was not aware of what was really going on, and was concerned about the hallucinations that were occurring.
With the help of his wife; John had finally realized that his best friend and niece were delusions of his imagination. He figured this out because they never got any older, but had stayed the same age over the years. In his mind he thought they were real. This meant that his delusions of people had been occurring since graduate school. The difference in the movie in regards to hallucinations and delusions is hard to separate. The delusions that John had in the movie were of the Russians chasing him, shooting at him, and trying to kill him. He thought people were spying on him and was afraid and paranoid for his safety. In his mind he thought the delusions were really occurring. The hallucinations that occurred were of Charles and his niece talking to him. The voices of the people he thought were real, were just a hallucination of his mind. They did not age is how he finally realized after all those years; they were not real.
“The electroconvulsive therapy is used to treat Johns’ schizophrenia. He goes through the treatment for ten weeks, for five days a week” . The treatment is to help decrease the delusions and hallucinations of the schizophrenia. This type of therapy seemed to have help John deal with his mental illness.
The character in the beginning of the movie had experienced paranoia, hallucinations, and conversational issues. He was not a people person, and would prefer to keep to himself. His obsession with numbers had escalated because he felt comfortable analyzing mathematical problems. Math and numbers was a way for John to communicate and relate to his environment. As his mental state progressed into a deeper state, he became more bizarre in his actions.
The movie portrays schizophrenia as a state of uncontrollable experiences. The mind controls the unreality of the character, and emphasizes on the illusions in his life. The stigma of the mental illness is shown in the movie based on the developing symptoms the character inhibits. Only the people who are close to him see this side of John. Others may see him as different, or weird and not someone with a mental illness. His willingness to fight the illness is not common in schizophrenia patients. There is not a very high chance someone could control it without medication. He is a math genius with a mental illness. The movie relates to his accomplishments of a Noble Prize, and he achieving this while having mental illness.
Work Cited
Howard, R. (Director). (2001). A Beautiful Mind [Motion Picture].
