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Essay On A Beautiful Mind

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A Life with Schizophrenia
The movie “A Beautiful Mind” helps the audience to see and understand how is it to live with schizophrenia. According to Cockerham, “Schizophrenia is a disturbance in an individual’s mood, thinking, and behavior, characterized by a distorted sense of reality that includes delusions and hallucinations” (34). The main character in this movie is John Nash, an American mathematician who struggles his whole life with schizophrenia. Although, in the long run he learns how to control it in a way that does not cause any physical or emotional harm to himself or others. For graduate school, he decides to go to Princeton University, where he competes with other students on coming up with an “original idea.” An original idea …show more content…

Nash is a very lonely man. He does not like people, and he thinks people do not like him either. He considers himself as the “lone wolf” mainly because people do not like him. This is all on his mind, there are many people that appreciate his hard work and care about him. The movie does a great job on making the audience believe that certain things are happening, but in reality, they are only hallucinations that Nash is experiencing. He hallucinates things like working for the government as spy against the Russians, seeing and talking to Charles, his roommate from Princeton University and his niece, but none of this is real. There is one scene where Nash is going to drop an envelope with confidential information in it at the house of this man that he is working for, but a shooting begins. This is when the man that hired Nash tells him to get into the car. In Nash’s mind, the Russians are the ones who are shooting at him. After the imaginary shooting, he goes back to his house and locked himself up in a room. His wife starts to wonder why he is acting that way, but she never thinks that he has a mental illness, she just thinks he had a bad day. This is the definitive outburst phase. The movie makes this scene like it’s actually happening.
Towards the middle of the movie, he is taken to McArthur Psychiatric Hospital to get treatment for his mental illness. At the hospital, he tries to justify his behavior by telling his

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