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A Beautiful Mind By John Nash

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A Beautiful Mind, a 2001 biographical drama, tells the story of John Nash; the film is based on a book by the same name, which was a biography of the real John Nash . The film depicts Nash’s life as he develops paranoid schizophrenia; this paper will focus on the film, the disorder itself, and the accuracies and inaccuracies of how paranoid schizophrenia was portrayed in the film. The film begins with Nash’s time at Princeton in 1947, where he has come after winning the Carnegie Scholarship for mathematics. Nash does not want to waste time on classes, instead wanting to focus on making his mark with an original idea of his own as soon as possible; because of this, he is not getting published like his classmates, which is a source of great …show more content…

A psychiatrist, Dr. Rosen, tries to talk to Nash but he punches him and further attempts to flee. Rosen forcibly sedates Nash. Nash comes to in a psychiatric hospital, where he is restrained. He tries again to flee, and while lying on the ground, he sees a hallucination of his old roommate from Princeton, Charles. When Alicia visits the hospital, Rosen tells her that due to the nature of Nash’s work, his illness may have gone untreated for longer than most, possibly since graduate school; he also tells her about Nash’s hallucination of Charles, and she has to come to terms with the fact that Charles, who she has heard so much about but never met, is not real. Alicia then goes to Nash’s office and sees his walls covered in magazine cutouts, showing how deep he had sunk into his hallucinations. Parcher, the D.O.D. agent, is also a hallucination; Alicia goes to the mailbox Nash has been putting classified documents into, and they are all there. When Alicia visits Nash, he tells her he believes the hospital is bugged, and that he is a part of a government conspiracy. After talking to Alicia, Nash harms himself looking for the special number he believes he was given by the D.O.D. Nash is then seen being put through insulin shock therapy. A year later, while visiting Princeton, Alicia tells Sol the delusions have passed. Some time later, Nash stops taking his medication

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