Introduction
When watching “A Beautiful Mind,” it is hard for viewers to understand who is real and who is imaginary until the truth is revealed. That is, in essence, what it would be like to live in the mind of John Nash. “A Beautiful Mind,” directed by Ron Howard and originally based on a biography by Sylvia Nasar, tells the story of John Forbes Nash Jr., a Nobel Peace Prize winner and a recognized American mathematician with schizophrenia. The main ethical dilemma, which isn’t introduced until the latter part of the movie, concerns Nash discontinuing his medication. If he discontinues his medications, his illusions will come back. The dilemma is whether it is ethically acceptable to let Nash discontinue his medication and continue to live at home or whether he should be hospitalized. The ethical dilemma presented in the movie impacts the characters in various ways, and the methods used to solve the dilemma exposes ethical principles that are being abused and, oppositely, positive principles used by the characters that are attempting to help Nash.
Summary of the content before the Dilemma
The first part of “A Beautiful Mind” introduces Nash and his unique way of thinking. It explains his initial breakthrough in mathematical theories and how he met his wife. In addition, his imaginative characters played a major role in his actions throughout the movie and can be easily thought of as realistic people by viewers until his condition is revealed. An example of one of Nash’s
1. The psychological disorder portrayed in character of John Nash in the film A Beautiful Mind is schizophrenia. The most prominent symptoms were hallucinations, grandiose delusions, paranoia, a persecutory complex. Beginning with DSM-V, two or more symptoms from the list of schizophrenic criteria must be present for at least six months and active for at least one month. John Nash certainly qualifies for another DSM-V criterion of diagnosis, social/occupational dysfunction, due to his apparent abandonment of relevant mathematical work in favor of conspiracy analysis/obsession. Nash is given the official diagnosis of schizophrenia during his admission to the mental hospital.
A Beautiful Mind illustrates many of the topics relating to psychological disorders. The main character of the film, John Nash, is a brilliant mathematician who suffers from symptoms of Schizophrenia. His symptoms include paranoid delusions, grandiosity, and disturbed perceptions. The disease disrupts his social relationships, his studies, and his work. The more stressful his life becomes the more his mind is not able to distinguish between reality and fantasy.
Throughout the duration of the film, John Nash appears to have a series of positive symptoms. According to King, positive symptoms “reflect something added above and beyond normal behavior”. This generalization is clearly evident in A Beautiful Mind. The most visible symptom that can be seen in John Nash’s behavior is his psychomotor movements. King states that “a person with schizophrenia may show unusual mannerisms, body movements, and facial expressions”. In the film, John Nash demonstrates these movements through
The movie, A Beautiful Mind was inspired by a novel about John Nash Jr. that shared the same name. John Nash Jr. was a famous mathematician who taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton University. After graduating from Princeton, he quickly gained recognition in the field of mathematics where he won a Nobel Prize in economics, as well as articulating a myriad of mathematical proofs and theories. Nash had been experiencing delusions and auditory hallucinations that led him to believe he was working for the pentagon to identify undercover-Soviet communication in the media. After his wife started noticing erratic behavior she forced him to go to a psychiatric hospital. His trip to the psychiatric hospital ended with him having
The movie “A Beautiful Mind” is based on the real life story of John Nash is the famed American mathematician with mental disease. It all begins when John registered as a graduate student at Princeton University in 1948 and a recipient of the prestigious Carnegie Prize for mathematics. He became obsessed to discover his own unique mathematical theory. He met his imagining roommate named Charles a literature student and became his best friend. After successfully improving his own theory, famed as game theory, John became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met his wife Alicia in his class, and they got married.
The movie Beautiful Mind is about Dr. John Nash who is a mathematical genius and a natural code breaker, at least in his own mind. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which is a psychological disorder. According to Baird (2011), paranoid schizophrenia is when a person has “delusions of grandeur and persecution often accompanied by hallucinations” (p. 273). The person has a split from real life circumstances, where their new reality becomes actual fact to them.
Character: The film A Beautiful Mind is a dramatized biographical telling of the life of renowned man John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner who attended graduate school at Princeton.
“A Beautiful mind” is a story based on the life of John Forbes Nash, who is a famous mathematician. Unfortunately, he is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia that majorly affects his personal and social life. Schizophrenia is a psychological disorder in which the patient’s ability to function is impaired by severely distorted beliefs, perceptions, and thought processes (Hockenbury, 2010).
Similar to the classic Frankenstein, Nash becomes obsessed with getting published that he neglects the small things that make him human. Despite successfully proposing a breakthrough that contradicts 150 years of belief, Nash eventually falls victim to Paranoid Schizophrenia, a common case of schizophrenia that incites hallucinations, delusions, and auditory disruptions. Although it does not hinder his academic success, when he marries to his wife Alicia and has a child his illness begins to become detrimental to those he loves most. Based on a true story of obsession and its repercussions, A Beautiful Mind delineates that knowledge is only beneficial if you don’t allow it to corrupt your
The film “A Beautiful Mind” is about the life of Nobel prize winner John Nash Jr who suffered with schizophrenia. The movie starts as Nash has entered graduate school at Princeton, he was a mathematical genius who made a discovery early I his career of an original idea that helped him earn international acclaim. The socially awkward genius soon found himself on a painful journey of self-discovery. John Nash made up a life that was not real, his friends and secrete job were also not real. He could not distinguish between what was real, imaginary and made up in his head. His diagnosis of schizophrenia interfered with his everyday life and overall caused him to break until he decided to ignore what would forever haunt him.
Maintaining accuracy while producing a biographical film is a difficult undertaking. It requires complex research and genuine understanding of the person in order to accurately represent them on screen. In 2001, film makers attempted to translate to screen the life of John Nash in A Beautiful Mind (Gazer & Howard). John Nash, who is a notable figure in the world of academia and mathematics, won the Nobel Prize in economics for his game theory (Nash, 1994). Nash is also widely known for his long-term struggle with mental illness and was diagnosed with schizophrenia during his mid-thirties (Samels & MacLowry, 2002). In order to examine the accuracy of this portrayal it is necessary to examine the aspects of schizophrenia displayed in the film such as the mannerisms, signs and symptoms, and forms of treatment; while comparing them to the actual realities of this disorder.
Even when an individual has a strong consolidated reality of their world, it is still susceptible to other’s influence and may eventually conform to this alter reality that is so strongly condoned by people surrounding them. Though one’s reality, formed by experiences of childhood and memory, may be strong and seemingly concrete, the persistent encouragement from others that the particular reality is false may yet have an immense impact on one’s reality. In Ron Howard’s adaptation of the biography of Professor John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, the notion that one’s consolidated reality can succumb to other’s influence is profoundly illustrated. Professor John Nash suffers from schizophrenia, and hence has illusions of people that do not exist. Though he had been strongly convinced that these people do not exist, he still sees them. However, he acknowledges them to be non-existent and a figment of his imagination. This poignantly expounds the strength of impact that other’s influence has on one’s interpretation of reality and indeed strongly disproves the idea that “Seeing is Believing”. Though Professor Nash’s illusions are caused by a mental disorder, it nonetheless shows the effect that the desire to ‘fit in’ to society or
Despite being diagnosed with schizophrenia, Nash maintained healthy relationships with his friends, his family, and his students. He continued to function at a high intellectual level and used reason to cope with hallucinations. For these, reasons, Nash’s story is unusual. Nash as depicted in, A Beautiful Mind, is an atypical case of someone diagnosed with schizophrenia. While the film fails to completely avoid stereotypical portrayals of schizophrenia, the atypical nature of Nash’s diagnosis associates mental illness with triumph and success contradicting the stereotypical view of schizophrenia as dangerous and debilitating.
I watched A Beautiful Mind for this project. The movie is based on the real life experiences of John Nash. The film begins with Nash arriving at Princeton University for his first year. We are introduced to many of the main characters in the first few minutes of the film. We meet his enemy, who Nash believes he is smarter that, and his roommate who drinks too much but is always there as a helping hand for John. As Nash begins his collegiate career we begin to see some early symptoms of his disorder. Nash is a gifted math student obsessed with finding a new way to predict patterns. He studies pigeons, his classmates as they play football outside his dorm window, and even the way his classmates talk to women at the bar. We see Nash
The movie, "A Beautiful Mind", John Nash, who is played by Russell Crowe, is a true story about a mathematician whose life is horrific because of his disease, schizophrenia. He was an egocentric man who studied Mathematics in Princeton University. During the whole time that he studied in Princeton, he was trying to come up with his own original idea. He felt that by only