Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind

In the film, the participants completed seven tasks, which were designed to highlight characteristics or symptomology of one or more mental illnesses. While observing each task, I sympathized with

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder often characterized by abnormal social behaviour and failure to recognize what is real. Common symptoms include false beliefs, unclear or confused thinking, auditory hallucinations, reduced social engagement and emotional expression, and inactivity. A person with schizophrenia often hears voices, experiences delusions and hallucinations and may believe thoughts, feelings and actions are controlled or shared by someone else.

The film “Girl, Interrupted” is a true story adapted from the original memoir by Susanna Kaysen. Set in the 1960s, it relates her experiences during her stay in a mental institution after being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder following a suicide attempt. Many films include characters with a mental illness; the actors who play these characters have the immense challenge of staying true to the illness they portray.

Generally people with mental issues are cast aside in society. The mentally impaired are immediately labeled as different. Questions on what to do with these people are common. In literature they are seen being locked into a tower room where they are forced to live their days peeling back the yellow wallpaper. This confines the characters to a world where it's just them and their insanity. These characters are present in many different stories. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Shakespeare's King Lear are two prime examples of characters suffering from mental disabilities and disorders. Although they are not locked in a tower, the mental illnesses are apparent when studying the Mad Hatter, Alice, King

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:

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about one in four American adults suffer from a mental disorder. This means that 57.7 out of 217.8 million people over the age of 18 are ill; never mind that mental illnesses are the leading cause of disability in Canada and the United States. Holden Caulfield, the controversial main character of J.D Salinger’s novel Catcher in the Rye, spends much of the book wandering through the streets of New York City. Kicked out of boarding school for the umpteenth time, he does many odd things: he calls a prostitute, tries to befriend a taxi driver, drinks with middle aged women, and sneaks into his own house in the middle of the night. While many of these things seem outré, some may even go as

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

Many individuals that struggle with mental illnesses and mental disorders overcome great barriers everyday. Not only are they able to face their obstacles but they are able to challenge us in many ways. Most importantly they are able to accomplish their own dreams just like you and me. Howard Hughes in The Aviator was a very energetic yet, determined and rather particular individual that fell in love with the process of building and reconstructing aircraft. His vision led him to fly the fastest and the biggest aircraft in history. Not only was he successful as a businessman but he was successful as a film maker as well. Though Howard Hughes was successful in the forefront, he often struggled with an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder that caused him great

The portrayal of people being sickly creatures has been used in Hollywood film for a very long time. This has been in the endeavor of putting the viewing public in the shoes of the patient and entertain them with over the top portrayals of disease. For patients that are women in particular this has been achieved by defining them along the lines of vague terms such as them being over emotional and unstable. Despite the advancement experienced by the society, women have not yet fully seen the goal of equality realize fruition. With the expansion of the psychiatric and psychological terminologies, there now additional ways via which mental illness can be ascribed as a weakness for men and women portrayed in Hollywood film. This is best

The movie A Beautiful Mind is a movie about a brilliant man, with Schizophrenia/Psychosis. Schizophrenia “is a serious disorder which affects how a person thinks, feels and acts. Someone with schizophrenia may have difficulty distinguishing between what is real and what is imaginary; may be unresponsive or withdrawn; and may have difficulty expressing normal emotions in social situations.” (http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/conditions/schizophrenia) Psychosis “is characterized by an impaired relationship with reality. And it is a symptom of serious mental disorders. People who are psychotic may have either hallucinations or delusions.” (https://www.healthline.com/health/psychosis) In the movie A Beautiful Mind our main character played by Russell Crowe experiences

In the movie “A Beautiful Mind” directed by Ronald William Howard, characterizes the story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia. The movie is based of the true life story of John Forbes Nash, portrayed in the movie by Russell Crowe. John is a college student attending Princeton University and early in his career he made an astonishing discovery and which became internationally renowned. This lead to him winning the Nobel Prize during his late years. The movie depicts John as an awkward and socially-inept student, who spent a lot of time to discover a revolutionary equation in mathematics.

In 2001, actor Russell Crowe played schizophrenic mathematician John Nash in the movie A Beautiful Mind. The movie is based on a true story and gave viewers insight into the condition known as schizophrenia. Nash had hallucinations and heard voices, but overcame these obstacles and went on to become a Princeton professor and was awarded the Nobel Prize.

“Imagine if you suddenly learned that the people, the places, the moments most important to you were not gone, not dead, but worse, had never been. What kind of hell would that be?” This was the reality for John Nash, the main character, in A Beautiful Mind. Nash would learn that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia later on in the film, not knowing that most of his time consumed was spent in hallucinations and delusions that he didn’t know weren’t real.

Popular culture repeatedly depicts individuals who have a mental illness as disrupting the social norm. Vividly creating the picture that sane minds differ from insane minds. But, does a sane and an insane mind truly exist? Or, does Hollywood neglect to show the neurodiversity that is inherent in our society because to do so would disrupt the social construction of mental illness? In this essay, I analyze the film, A Beautiful Mind, to understand how the film portrays schizophrenia. Through providing a summary of the film, presenting neurobiological knowledge about schizophrenia and analyzing how the film depicts John Nash’s experience with schizophrenia, I argue that individuals who have a mental illness are not “the others.” How popular culture depicts mental illness affects

Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange focuses on the violent and destructive tendencies of the narrator, a fifteen year old boy named Alex. By enlisting Alex as the narrator of his own story, Burgess gives the reader a firsthand account of everything leading up to Alex being captured and imprisoned, first in a jail and then in an institution for the mentally unsound. By including his accounts of what life was like before and after his incarceration, Alex’s character makes social commentary on several issues that were relevant at the time of the novel’s publication, 1963, and remain relevant even in the present, such as rehabilitation in prisons and the treatment of patients in psychiatric institutions. When Alex details his assault on an older, professor-type man, “The old veck began to make sort of chumbling shooms- ‘wuf waf wof’- so Georgie let go of holding his goobers apart and just let him have