In the movie “A Beautiful Mind” John Nash is a math genius who gets accepted to Princeton University. From the minute he starts at Princeton and for the majority of his life Nash starts seeing people that others cannot see. While at Princeton he meets a man named Charles, who is a hallucination that becomes his one and only friend. Then later on Charles introduces Nash to his niece. As Nash goes on to Graduate school he starts to meet people that he believes are FBI agents and that these agents have a mission for Nash to find Soviet codes in magazines and newspaper articles. Everyone from Charles to the FBI agents are all hallucinations in the mind of Nash. After sometime of seeing all of the hallucinations they started to come after him and try to kill Nash and his family (in his mind). In the end Nash is able to overcome his ability and live a happy life keeping it controlled without any medication.
During the movie John Nash had positive symptoms of Schizophrenia, which are the Hallucinations and delusions he experienced in the movie. A positive symptom of schizophrenia are “pathological excesses” or strange situations to a person’s behavior (textbook definition). The hallucinations that John Nash was experiencing in the movie where all of the people that he thought where real such as, Charles and his niece, and the FBI agents. The delusions, which are defined as ideas that they believe whole heartedly but have no basis in fact (textbook definition), where when Nash thought he was going to the pentagon and receiving his task from the FBI agents, when he thought he was really decoding soviet messages through newspapers and magazines and when he thought the FBI agents were out to get him.
Another symptom that Nash showed in the film was a Negative symptom, which is defined as “pathological deficits” characteristics that are lacking in an individual (textbook definition). The negative symptom that Nash showed was social withdrawal. In the beginning of the film Nash mainly stayed in his room to work on his theory and spent all of his time with the hallucination Charles, believing that he was his only friend, where towards the end of the movie Nash spent all of his time of the “mission” he thought was given to him by the FBI agents. Both of these things took John away from his other duties, classmate, family, and job and he spent all of his time with these hallucinations.
Nash was diagnosed with paranoid Schizophrenia. The type of treatment that Nash received was insulin shock therapy and prescribed antipsychotic medications to get rid of all the hallucinations. The shock therapy was very painful process for Nash and the medication made him feel tired, slow and lazy all the time so Nash stopped taking the medication.
