A Beautiful Mind and Disability Essay

A Beautiful Mind is a good movie by Ron Howard, about a man that has lost his grip on what is real and what is fiction. This started when he was in graduate school and no one really noticed until his wife had him committed to the hospital. John Nash, the main character of the film portrayed by Russell Crowe, is a great mathematician that became a victim to paranoid schizophrenia. At first he does not notice the problems, and being that we are seeing everything from his prospective we do not notice them either. Only after he is admitted to the hospital by his wife do we see that some of the main people in his life are just products of his mind. As was said in the movie, â€Å"What must it be like to realize not that those you treasure and hold dear are not lost or dead but have never been? What kind of hell would that be? † This is a true tragedy that is common with paranoid schizophrenia. I guess that in reality John Nash is a man that truly exemplifies the statement that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. This is probably why his problems were not addressed for as long as they were, people overlooked them because they would lose the benefit of that genius if they were to try and fix the erratic behaviors that he showed. John Nash suffered from many of the classic symptoms of this illness. He was paranoid that people were after him, which was healthy in his classified work. He had different friends and co-workers who did not exist anywhere but in his own mind. See more: Unemployment – problems and solutions essay   He started showing progressive erratic behavior towards his friends and family. In the end, right before the hospital, the fantasy realm was what was real to him and the real world just the work of fiction. I agree with the movie that he was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. However, if he was forced to continue the treatments of the times I believe that he would have fallen even further. While on the medications you noticed that he was becoming depressed which ould have lead him to Manic Depression, and I can only imagine what continued insulin shock would have done to his mind and body. None of good I am sure. There were some major people in his life. The first was Charles Herman his Princeton roommate, William Parcher his boss with the Department of Defense, Alicia Nash his wife and Martin Hansen his main rival at school. He was close to Charles his best friend since college and worked well with William his boss at the Department of Defense, the only problem neither of them existed. Alicia became estranged from him because of his illness, but his brilliance was also what she loved about him as well. After his diagnoses his main true friend was the Dean at Princeton, his old rival Martin. When John stopped taking his medication and was looking to return to society he allowed him to use the library everyday to work on his problems and math in peace. Then once he thought he wanted to teach again he had the faith to talk the board into letting him teach. The two most helpful people to John Nash were his wife, Alicia and his old rival Martin. They believed in him when no one else would or thought they should. John was able to cope with his illness in the end because he had a break thru that his friend, Charles’ niece never aged; therefore she and they could not exist. This allowed him to start ignoring them and start functioning again in the real world without his medication. After dealing with my husband’s mother I believe that Russell Crowe should have won the Oscar, the SAG, and the Golden Globe for his realistic performance of a man that has lost his grip on the world around him. He not only showed you the ups and downs of this illness but he showed you that there is hope for everyone that has to deal with these problems daily. I also believed that this film helped bring to light how outdated some thoughts on mental illness can be and what is possible when you look beyond the surface and see the person underneath.