A Beautiful Mind
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In the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”, the main character John Nash suffers from schizophrenia. The movie follows his journey through graduate school at Princeton University with his friend and roommate, Charles. During this time, you find out that John is really intellectual and smart, but not very social. After graduate school, he accepts an appointment at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with two of his friends from graduate school. This is where John meets his future wife, Alicia. While he is at MIT, his hallucinations begin. He believes a defense agent asks him to decipher an enemy encryption code at the Pentagon. He also believes the Soviets were after him. Johns friends and wife realize his paranoid behavior, and discover that he is delusional. He is put in a psychiatric facility, and given medicine. He is released on the terms that he will continue to take his medicine, but after experiencing some negative effects, he decides to stop one day. John then experiences more hallucinations that cause his son to almost drown, and him to think his friends want him to kill his wife. His wife and he decide to live with his schizophrenia, and he learns to conquer his hallucinations. He begins teaching at Princeton University, and goes on to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by impairment of perception of reality and social dysfunction. Someone who has schizophrenia often suffers from disorganized thinking and delusions and hallucinations. There is no test for schizophrenia, but it is diagnosed by a psychiatrist or clinical psychologist based on their observations of the patients behavior and experiences. Schizophrenia often gets confused with dissociative identitiy disorder (multiple/split personality), but these two mental disorders are very different.
In this movie, there are many scenes that depict this disorder. It shows John first suffering when he is at Princeton and has a very difficult social life. Later, at MIT, his hallucinations begin and drive him to become paranoid and delusional. He experiences hallucinations again after stopping his medication. He wanders around the house while he was supposed to be watching his son in the bathtub, and the boy almost drowns. He also believes that people are telling him to kill his wife. According to the information I have read about schizophrenia, I believe this film does a good