Analysis of the Film, A Beautiful Mind Essay

Negative symptoms refer to the loss of abilities rather than actual gain. Avolition is the inability for a person to be involved in activities or pursue normal daily functions. Alogia is when a person uses little to no words while talking to someone. An example of this is if a person gives short replies to someone such as “yes” or “no” and refrains from actual conversation. Anhedonia is described as a lack of pleasure or refrain from activities that would normally be pleasurable. Disorganized speech is when a person is trying to present an idea or conversation to someone, and cannot stay coherent and has trouble trying to describing ideas (Andreasen P.382), (Barlow

The film Beautiful Mind illustrates the life of a bright mathematician by the name of John Nash. He suffers from a severe form of mental illness- paranoid schizophrenia. His mental issues began in early adulthood, affecting his career and personal life. John Nash’s abnormal behavior towards the individuals surrounding him makes others find him as strange and distant. His behavior meets the criteria for abnormal, Nash is suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations and a distorted perception of reality. John Nash believes that Parcher, the US government agent, is relying on his unique decoding ability to help detect the Russian’s messages in order to find the bomb planted by them in the United States. He also believes that

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.

In the movie, A Beautiful Mind, John Nash is the main character who gets accepted into Princeton. He is an extremely smart man who is very gifted in mathmatecis and looks for patterns in everyday life. John Nash has a mental disorder in which he imagines situations and people that are not real: this is called Schizophrenia. John Nash lives in his apartment with his imaginary roomate: Charles Herman. John is also recrutied by another character that he imagines: William Parcher. John imagines that he is recruited by the United States government to work against the Russians to find out where the Russians are going to plant a nuclear bomb. He gets married to a woman named Alicia, and she eventually figures out about the situation. A doctor is called (named Dr. Rosen) to help to try and treat John’s case of Schizophrenia. John goes to a mental hospital where they

There are three main types of schizophrenia, including paranoid schizophrenia is when the person has "false beliefs" that someone is plotting against them. Disorganized schizophrenia is someone whose behavior is disturbed and has no purpose, inappropriate emotions, and disorganized speech. Catatonic schizophrenia is when the person cannot move, speak, or respond. They may maintain a pose, sometimes for extended periods of time.

“Psychological disorders: are any pattern of behavior or thinking that causes people significant distress, causes them to harm others, or harms their ability to function in daily life” according to Ciccarelli & White (2015). The American film A Beautiful Mind is based on the life of the 1994 Nobel Prize winner John Nash. This biographical film describes the life of the mathematician through all the stages of his life, starting when he was a college student at the University of Princeton, to professor and finally as a schizophrenic recovering patient. One of the many remarkable aspects in the life of Dr. Nash is his recovery from Schizophrenia. The psychological disorder schizophrenia is one of the many psychological disorders that people suffer, this disorder includes several different types of symptoms, and it is characterized by disorganized thought, perception and behavior. There are several treatments for this disorder, which include different medication, but in this particular case John Nash helped to his prompt recovery by having the will to fight the disorder, but first he had to acknowledge the fact that he was actually hallucinating several parts of his life, which for many people could be the most difficult step to take towards the recovery from the disorder.

The movie “A Beautiful Mind” is a true story about a man and his journey with schizophrenia. John Nash was smart and going places. He was working towards his PHD when symptoms of this disorder started taking place. Throughout the movie he showed symptoms for a long time but no one ever noticed. Then eventually he got help from hospitals, and medicine. Several incidents in the movie show signs of the problem. One time he thought he had a tracking device in his arm so he self-harmed to find it. He heard things. Nash even saw and interacted with things that did not exist. This made him afraid. It affected his wife but she stayed with him. John was in and out of schizophrenia in the movie. He would be fine then something or someone would trigger

According to modern Neuroscience, mental illnesses have become an increasingly popular commodity within the medical community. Even though Schizophrenia only affects one percent of today’s population, the damage behind this mental illness is perilous (cite kate). One third of the hospital beds in Canada are occupied by individuals who have been diagnosed by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (add citation by Kate). Essentially, schizophrenia is characterized as an important chronic brain disorder that has a significant impact on an individual’s life. Through the eyes of a psychologist, it is imperative to understand how to properly recognize, diagnosis, and treat the disorder accordingly. In the film, A Beautiful Mind, released in 2001, John Nash portrayed by Russell Crowe (the movie client) is a Caucasian male who is diagnosed with Schizophrenia in his mid-twenties.

A Beautiful Mind is centered on the character named John Forbes Nash. Nash was a bright and intelligent mathematician. He started his career at Princeton University. Nash was a math graduate, who was widely recognized by others for his smartness. John was socially awkward and spent a lot of his time trying to come up with an innovative math equation. The importance of Nash’s work he did four decades earlier received recognition and in 1994 he received a Nobel Peace Prize. Going mid-ways in the movie, you start to see that a lot of the situations and things John portrays, are only created illusions of his mind. From there, you start to see how John fits the signs and symptoms of having schizophrenia.

Negative symptoms involve less than normal behavior or absence of normal behavior; poor attention, flat affect, and poor speech production (Cicarelli, p. 558).

“A Beautiful Mind” depicts the true- story of a mathematical savant, John Nash and how schizophrenia has affected both his personal and social life. His hallucinations started in his college years at Princeton University and only worsened from then on. He hallucinated his roommate and best friend, Charles and his niece, Marcee. He also hallucinated that he worked secretly for the US Department with the aid of his supervisor, Parcher (also a fragment of his imagination). He became extremely paranoid but eventually came to the realization that he was sick when he almost lost his wife and child. At the end, he was able to live as a schizophrenic without the use of medication. He was able to distinguish reality from fantasy and lived on to receive a Nobel Prize for his work as a mathematician. This paper will describe schizophrenia, its history, symptoms, biological factors as well as its environmental aspect.

As someone who has always found mental illnesses very intriguing the film “A Beautiful Mind” never fails to tug at my emotions. John Nash, a brilliant mathematician, faces a series of struggles due to his bad case of schizophrenia that makes him believe he is a secret agent that is on a very complex mission; this effects not only his work life but family. In this film I felt the attitudes towards John’s disability varied; his wife Alicia did everything she could to support John regardless of the circumstances and how good or bad he was. Other people such as his co-workers and friends gave him pity, and doubted John. They felt once his schizophrenia got to the extent it did, he was helpless and their was no returning back to brilliant man he once was. At first John is unaware of his disability, he thinks everything that is going on in his head is true and everything his “best friend” Charles whispers into his ear, is a task he must perform. As he becomes more aware of his disease I find him to be at times very impatient with it; he did not want to work with himself to make himself better and he would have to accept his disability before he could improve in any way. As the movie progresses, I do notice the way he works with himself and although the obstacles are still there he channels a way to handle it and accept that what he thinks is there, is not. He learns to cope and he is less stubborn about working with himself so his disability does not restrict him. I feel John is

The movie “A Beautiful Mind” directed by Ron Howard is based on the real story of mathematician John F. Nash Jr., played by Russell Crow. John Nash was a gifted young man from West Virginia that, while studying in Princeton, created his “game theory” also knows as “Nash equilibrium”, which was the break through in modern economics, and for which he got the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics later on in his life.

John Nash’s biopic, is not as accurate and many would hope it would be. Many aspects of his life were taken out of the film, and instead replaced with moments, that either made him delusional for example, seeing imaginary people, or changing his life for the better, like taking his medication. Throughout the film, we rarely do not see the mistakes he makes, a part from a few. In an article for Slate, written by Chris Suellentrop says that it is “Nowhere near as complicated as the real one.” (Slate, 2001). The reason why he says this is because John Nash’s life behind the scenes, is not what you see on the screen. A lot of things have happened, and it shows that Ron Howard did not want to demonstrate that, as

In the film, “A Beautiful Mind,” the viewer learns about the life of a famous mathematician named John Forbes Nash Jr. The film documents not only Nash’s most crowning achievements but also the obstacles he faced while on his way to these successes. Nash suffers from a mental disorder, known as “Schizophrenia,” whose essential ingredient is “psychosis.” Psychosis is responsible for many changes in a person’s behavior which [usually] result from the views of themselves in relation to the world, especially those around them, that are birthed by psychosis. During an episode of psychosis, also refered to as “psychotic episodes,” a person often experiences “pronoia” or “paranoia.” These two experiences are complete opposites and each come with their difficulties. The most common, and well-known, form of schizophrenia is the one characterized by paranoid psychotic episodes. Because Nash’s schizophrenic episodes are primarily filled with paranoia, the movie’s decision to use Nash’s story helps further the narrative of the prominence of paranoid psychotic episodes in schizophrenic individuals.