A Beautiful Mind, a biographical film that discusses various issues in the field of psychological disorders, tells the biographical story of John Nash, an American Nobel Prize winner. The fact that makes a movie an interesting documentary is that parts of the events in the movie the viewers may see from Nash’s delusional perspective. Everyone has a chance to experience the harsh reality of mentally-ill people.
In general, the film concentrates on Nash’s fighting against paranoid schizophrenia. The movie depicts a lot of details to secure an accurate portrayal of the disease and add a realistic tone to the plot. The main character struggles with several symptoms of Schizophrenia that affect his life. To be more precise, the hero experiences such symptoms as paranoid delusions and grandiosity.
Besides, the symptoms Nash suffers from disrupt his perception of reality. Throughout the movie, it becomes evident that the mentioned diseases affect every sphere of Nash’s life, including his position in society, academic life, and work.Being a talented mathematician, one day Nash is asked to the Pentagon to decrypt coded Russian transmitted information. His efforts impress a high-level agent William Parcher.
The viewers may see soon that Nash has a strong passion for his mission, and finally it leads him to hospitalization. He became crazy because of fantasies that exist in his mind. He couldn’t merely restrain the mental illness. Nash’s primary delusion was that he was working on a top-secret government mission that had the potential to save the US.
In some moments, the viewers become even believe the hero because of the power of Nash’s paranoid delusions.Another important theme discussed in the movie is the adverse effects of medication, and its powerless as far as such mental disease as Schizophrenia is concerned. Ones such adverse effects may be noticed when the hero realizes that he can do nothing with his sexual dysfunction and sedation. Besides, Nash has endless hallucinations and delusions, even when he is taking his medications.
Hence, even though in the movie Nash is taking a newer medicine as a method of dealing with schizophrenia, in one moment the hero decides to stop taking his medication, being assured that he can deal with the disease himself. Contrary to what the viewers may expect, his wife supports the hero. She agrees that they can combine their efforts and work things out without any medication that only makes Nash feel worse. Nevertheless, in some time after Nash’s self-treatment practice, the delusions return, and Nash merely loses control over the situation.
The hero’s expectations fail, and the disease seems to become even stronger.All in all, a movie is a great biographical story that augments traditional methods of medicine, rendering the harsh realities of such severe mental disease as Schizophrenia to the audience. A Beautiful Mind successfully addresses the central idea that although medications are not a cure-all method, they are an inevitable part of treatment. The movie may serve as an encyclopedia for creating one’s better understanding of Schizophrenia.
