A Beautiful Mind And The Soloist Analysis

Although some people with schizophrenia can live seemingly normal lives, the movie accurately displays the overwhelming nature of schizophrenia for a person who is not only homeless and off medication but has PTSD.

The short documentary Crooked Beauty, directed by Ken Paul Rosenthal, narrates Jacks Ashley McNamara’s experience in a psychiatric ward and how her time in the facility shapes her new appreciation for her mental illness. One controversial issue has been trying to identify the true cause of mental illness. On the one hand, most people may think mental illness is simply a biological disorder that can be cured with a combination of medication and doctors demanding appropriate behavior until it sticks in the patient’s mind. On the other, McNamara contends that mental illness is a misconception with a patient’s oversensitivity, where it is harder for the patient to ignore certain events than “normal” people, and their doctor’s textbook knowledge. In McNamara’s mental institution, the psychiatrists simply trap her in a padded room and prescribe many different pills to suppress her mental illness instead of embracing her differences or showing her how to use those differences to her advantage. In attempt to prevent those who are mentally ill from feeling the same anger and frustration she felt, she demands a change in the line psychiatric treatment when she says:

In Ron Howard's work, A Beautiful Mind, depicts the real life account of Professor John Nash and his struggle with paranoid Schizophrenia. The topic of mental illness has become popularized as of late, particularly in popular media (film, television). This focus on mental disorders has greatly improved awareness of mental disorders, but this media has become a double edged sword. The same process that educates people (ie these films and shows) can also disseminate largely false or misleading information. In the film, both sides of this information distribution phenomena are expressed. To evaluate the effectiveness of the movie to accurately describe the occurrence of paranoid Schizophrenia one must look at the accuracy of the onset,

One of the ways to understand intelligence is to compare and contrast the historical and contemporary theories of intelligence. Spearman believed that an individual’s intelligence could be measured by one factor and that all people have a common skills set (g factor) that underlies all intelligent behavior. Spearman found all these g factors correlate in people meaning that if they score well in one area they tend to score well in other. But by putting everyone under one skill set by he failed to take into account the diversity of individuals and their individual strengths. In the movie The Soloist, for example, Nathaniel Ayers, a schizophrenic homeless man is a music virtuoso who plays many instruments at a concert level (many of them without formal training) has compromised areas of reasoning or spatial ability. He talks to non-real people, has distorted perceptions of things around

exaggerating symptoms and stereotyping individuals with a mental disorder. For example, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film Psycho, in which man with schizophrenia murders guests in a hotel, influences viewers to believe that all individuals suffering from schizophrenia are dangerous. However, that is rarely the case (Polatis, 2014). Therefore, it is refreshing to find a movie that accurately portrays the true personality of and individual living with a mental illness. The movie Silver Linings Playbook chronicles the experiences of Pat Solitano, a man suffering from undiagnosed bipolar disorder who was recently released from a psychiatric facility. Although this paper focuses on Pat’s experiences, it is important to note that the film not only takes on the task of portraying bipolar disorder, but also mental illness in general with other major characters suffering from a mixture of psychological or personality disorders. The film opens with Pat at Karel Psychiatric Facility in Baltimore, Maryland. We later learn that Pat was institutionalized for nearly beating to death the man with whom he caught his wife Nikki cheating on him. The rest of the film details

A Beautiful Mind is an inspiring story about triumph over schizophrenia, among the most devastating and disabling of all mental disorders. A Beautiful Mind succeeds in realistically describing the disturbed thinking, emotion, perception, and behavior that characterizes the disorder, and shows the difficult task of management of and/or recovery from the disorder. The movie communicates the vital importance of the factors that contributed to Nash's recovery and achievement of his amazing potential as a gifted intellectual. For instance, Nash was treated with dignity and respect by most of his academic peers. Social support and tolerance enabled him to regain his capacity for productive work that led to his receipt of the Nobel Prize for

Many people today believe they are experts on schizophrenia due to hollywood titles such as 1948 blockbuster The Snake Pit or the 2001 hit A Beautiful Mind. However, many people do not know the cause, the symptoms, or the experiences people who suffer from schizophrenia face. Schizophrenia is a psychological disorder characterized by a split between thought and emotion where a person has difficulty distinguishing whether altered thoughts, perceptions, & conscious experiences are real versus imagined (Grison, Heatherton, and Gazzaniga, 2015, p. 518).

In many movies the producers have an individual playing a violent character who’s supposed to have schizophrenia. These people are stereotyped as being unpredictable and dangerous. Suicide is very high among people with schizophrenia but the risk of violence is very small according to U. S. National Institute of Mental Health. The entertainment world have society believing that people with schizophrenia harm themselves. More research is needed to show how movies give the public the wrong perception of the illness.

A study found that the portrayal of schizophrenic forty-two people in forty-one films were mostly male Caucasians, displaying traits of schizophrenia, and appearing delusional and a danger to themselves or others (Owen P. R., 2012). Owen’s study (2012) also found that of those forty-two characters, a quarter of them committed suicide in the film, and one third of them participated in “homicidal behaviour.”

"Schizophrenia is a cruel disease. The lives of those affected are often chronicles of constricted experiences, muted emotions, missed opportunities, unfulfilled expectations. It leads to a twilight existence, a twentieth-century underground man...It is in fact the single biggest blemish on the face of contemporary American medicine and social services; when the social history of our era is written, the plight of persons with schizophrenia will be recorded as having been a national scandal."

• The students talk about the Carnegie Prize, which John Nash and Martin Hansen both win.

Families with a member suffering from any illness may be stressful enough but families with members diagnosed with schizophrenia are often faced with additional challenges such as the “external stressors of social stigma, isolation, and emotional frustration”. Many times, family conflicts arise as members attempt to provide care on an everyday basis (Chien, 2010, pg. xi). “A Beautiful Mind” is a brilliant motion picture directed by Ron Howard that chronicles the life of one John Nash, a prominent mathematician and the challenges he endures throughout his adult life afflicted with a chronic mental illness. “A Beautiful Mind” allows us to gain insight into the stressors that many families undergo when faced with living with a person with

Schizophrenia is often depicted in film and media, and because the media has a powerful impact on people, individuals must be careful not to base their views solely on what they see and hear in movies because information may be misrepresented for entertainment purposes. In the films The Soloist and A Beautiful Mind, schizophrenic disorders are illustrated through the protagonists. When comparing these films with scholarly sources, it is apparent that the films appropriately represent the clinical descriptions and symptoms of a schizophrenic disorder; however, the treatments for these disorders are misrepresented.

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.