"A Beautiful Mind"

SUMMARY:

Released in December 2001, A Beautiful Mind is the movie based on mathmatician John Forbes Nash Jr. who suffered from Paranoid Schizophrenia. The movie stars Russell Crowe, who plays John Nash Jr. and Jennifer Connelly who plays the wife of Nash. Crowe makes an astonishing advancement in the foundations of "game theory" which gains him national acclaim while he attends Princeton University. Soon after Crowe is recruited by the CIA to aid in the area of code-breaking. Throughout the film Russell Crowe battles schizophrenia and ultimately learns to conquer his illness, and wins a Noble Peace Prize. John Nash actually did win a Noble Peace Prize in 1994 for advances in Economic Sciences. The film was nominated for 8 Oscars and won 4 of them.

CONNECTION:

This film can be linked to our studies on abnormal behaviors in chapter 12 of our psychology course. John Nash Jr. suffered from a specific form of schizophrenia known as "paranoid schizophrenia." Schizophrenia is a condition in which patterns of severe disturbed thinking, emotion, perception, and behaivor occur. Nash's wife states that he began to talk of characters who were putting him in danger, an organization of men wearing red ties was chasing him. He even mailed letters to foreing embassies in Washington D.C. saying that he was going to establish a new world government. As we covered in the course, schizophrenia is an abnormal mental disorder in which perceptions of reality are distorted.